Rebecca Salter: Making Her Mark on Minimalism

Engaging with Japanese traditional materials and philosophies, Rebecca Salter’s prints and paintings embody the idea of onko chishin – to learn from the old to produce the new. Inspired by her 6 years spent in Japan, she combines her training in ceramics and printmaking with her current preoccupations of materiality and transcendent transmission. 

Her paintings and drawings are formed through a meditative mark making process, holding a space for each piece, where she connects with the material, the repetitious movements, and then emotive quality of her surroundings. In particular, Salter transmits ‘time’, a tangible expansive solitude through which creator, viewer, and artwork can connect in contemplation. While the droplets, burns, and bleeding ink of her pieces might not come from Japanese painterly tradition, it’s this philosophical preoccupation behind each movement that reimagines a new form for Zen philosophy’s place in contemporary sumi ink arts.

Bringing this perspective, Salter breathes new life into mid-century minimalism from North America – combining their repetitive quality with the slow, muted minimalism of Zen Śūnyatā, a space of nothingness. She pursues an alternative beauty, an astringent and unobtrusive beauty that enmeshes simplicity and complexity, making intimate exploration of the material properties and constraints of her medium and tools, particularly her use and destruction of fibrous Japanese papers. 

Wetting, stretching, burning the paper, the absorbent fibres of her material are often exposed, wrapped around stretching bars or aluminium panels. Forming grids, Salter both interprets and ignores the patterns made by the paper, undermining its function of control in some pieces and following its intrinsic paths in others. She creates an ebb and flow between her work, setting a slow rhythm as one’s eyes trace each mark made in collaboration with the will of the paper and the ink. 

Reminiscent of Japanese Buddhist calligraphy and ink painting, where mark making becomes spiritually transcendent in both the making of and the ruminating upon, Salter utilises the absorbent nature of her material to merge her marks and substrate into one, and invites viewers to become enmeshed in her works. She utilises the eastern painterly perspective, bringing her marks to and around the edge of her canvas; consuming one’s peripheral vision to swallow them within her grey ink worlds, Salter urges us to discover something about both her and ourselves.

Rather than capturing koan, or Buddhist spiritual teachings embedded in visual and spoken dialogues, Salter’s abstracted meditations on materiality transmit the emotional qualities of her experiences — connecting with nature, seeing rain roll down a glass pane. She creates a new face for minimalism, seeking something new in both the Western and Japanese minimalist traditions and finding harmony amongst their differences