Nitrate

Like the dancing wooden table imagined by Karl Marx in Capital, all commodities are shape shifters. They appear to metamorphose. But nitrate materially changes. Its power as a substance and value as commodity lie in its capacity to change from material to immaterial state, to transform and to be transformative. Chilean nitrate is a sodium nitrate that, once processed, can be used as a fertiliser and to make explosives. It is the element nitrogen, which comprises eighty per cent of the earth’s atmosphere, in this compound form that can speed or shatter life.
[Extract from Louise Purbrick's text in the exhibition catalogue]