About
Lia Bruce has been fascinated by salt since her early childhood.
Inspired by her grandmother, who made traditional amulets sewing salt into little cotton bags, she started creating installations made of salt in her early years as a student of art.
With architecture studies at the Technion in Haifa, a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts, and a Master’s in Industrial Design at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, she combines engineering skills with artistic talent, alongside a never ending desire to heal our environment. SaltwareDesign was born of this passion. All her designs are individually hand-crafted in her workshop, surrounded by a Mediterranean garden, created with love and care, and carry a unique character. SaltwareDesign artifacts are exquisite and of profound spiritual and healing significance.
The groundbreaking technology that allowed her work to form the residual salt into such forms, textures, colors, and shapes is an integral part of her initiative of SaltwareDesign.
In 2015 Professor Daniel Mendler from the Institute of Chemistry at the Hebrew University answered a public call by the Israeli government for a practical solution to handle a vast amount of cooking salt that accumulates as a residue of the Dead Sea mining.
Professor Mendler and his team developed a sustainable technology that turns the salt into robust, 100% green three dimensional object with no synthetic additives, durable to pressure and humidity, and manufactured in a very low energy consumption process.
As a designer, Bruce sought to merge salt’s scientific and technological challenges with its crucial significance in culture and found this life mission in the unique dead sea salts.
