Gregory Beson’s Salt Chair: Made from Himalayan Pink Salt
I love a piece of design that makes you look twice, and Gregory Beson’s Salt Chair certainly does that. Created in 2019, it is fashioned from 76 blocks of Himalayan pink salt. Yes, actual salt.
Beson is a New York-based designer and sculptor with a fascination for materials and the stories they carry. The salt blocks came from a cave in northern Pakistan before being sculpted into the chair in New York. It is simply beautiful, but the choice of material is about rather more than its lovely pink glow.
The Salt Chair was created for the 2019 In Good Company exhibition, and Beson used it to explore our complicated relationship with natural materials and resources. Salt feels completely ordinary to us, yet here is a natural mineral extracted in Pakistan, transported across the world and transformed into a piece of collectible furniture. That contrast is really the point.
There is another clever reference hidden in its architecture. The arrangement of the blocks beneath the seat echoes the central plaza of Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in California. I like that – the familiar little salt brick suddenly becomes architectural.
Whatever you make of all the mythology surrounding Himalayan pink salt, visually there is no doubting its impact. Each block shifts through cloudy white, peach and pink, and the material changes beautifully as light passes through it. Something we normally think of as granular, edible and everyday suddenly feels heavy, permanent and almost monumental.
I originally spotted the chair through Sight Unseen’s coverage of In Good Company. There were some wonderfully fresh expressions of everyday materials in the exhibition, but this is the one that stayed with me.
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