Japanese Artist Motoi Yamamoto creates these incredibly detailed pieces with plain old table salt which he painstakingly applies with a plastic bottle. He spends literally hundreds of hours on each piece, creating intricate patterns, staircases of salt blocks or even salt labyrinths. The Japanese artist became fascinated with salt as a third year student at the Kanazawa College of Art in 1996, after his younger sister died of brain cancer aged 24. In Japanese culture, in times of mourning, salt is used to ward away evil spirits. Mourners also sprinkle themselves with salt.