Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art: Mourning Songs of Salt and Silt

The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art presents “Mourning Songs of Salt and Silt,” an exhibition of memorial cyanotypes by Amy Elkins.

One of the oldest forms of photographic technology, the cyanotype process allows artists to transfer impressions of objects directly onto a surface without the intervention of a camera. The pictures are developed by exposing them to the sun. The chosen object becomes a participant in the process, a drawing tool, a shaper of its own representation. Taking advantage of this uniquely immediate way of producing images, Elkins has used her father’s ashes to make large, enveloping fabric artworks that surround the viewer with constellations of ghostly, speckled blue.

By including natural materials such as ash, salt, sand, and silt, and rinsing her compositions in bodies of natural water, she symbolically and materially reunites her father with the landscape he inhabited throughout his adulthood. His two decades of work in a Californian marine biology lab are represented by her use of the Pacific Ocean, and the days he spent swimming with friends as a young man are manifested through freshwater creeks. The exhibition also includes artifacts from his life.

Bringing an array of elemental forces together into a beautiful whole, Elkins has created unique portraits that hint at the ineffable particularity of a person, the transience of existence, and the ongoing action of posthumous release. Describing the work, she writes—

“Exposed in the sun as a means of holding on. Rinsed in bodies of water as a means of letting go. An action that both safekeeps his ashes and releases them into the natural world.”

“Mourning Songs of Salt and Silt” will be on view from February 20–June 13, 2026. The Museum is open from Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Entry is free.