Photographer Leah Kennedy, who lives in Perth, the biggest city in Western Australia, set out to document the region’s countless salt lakes.

All of the images in the series, which Kennedy named Salis (the Latin word for salt), were taken in an approximately 350-mile radius of Perth that encompassed coastlines and inland lakes.

Australia’s salt lakes predate human settlement, but over the past hundred years so-called “secondary salinization,” the result of Australian farmers’ misguided agricultural practices, has made the lakes’ natural chemistry even more extreme.

The extreme conditions in Western Australia produce lakes that, when viewed from above, throb with extraordinary shades of rust, lemon yellow, pink, lavender, and bright green.

Kennedy captured aerial images of the lakes from a small Cessna flying about 5,000 feet above the ground.

If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might think Kennedy’s photographs were elegant works of abstract art.

“Salt has both negative and positive associations,” Kennedy says. “From the agricultural point of view, salt is not a good thing, but on the flip side of that, salt lakes can be quite biodiverse places.”

Contrary to the popular image of salt lakes as “dead,” scientists have actually found hundreds of species of invertebrates thriving in high-salinity Western Australian lakes.

Both Kennedy and her pilot were struck by the resemblance between the landscape and Aboriginal art, much of which is highly abstract.

“The lakes looked quite primitive and ancient,” Kennedy says. “It was uncanny to see that relationship.”

Like most of Kennedy’s work, the salt lake photographs are devoid of people.

Even when Kennedy is shooting environments with man-made elements, humans are usually absent.

“I wouldn’t say I’ve purposely gone out of my way to exclude humans,” Kennedy explains, “it just seems to be what I gravitate towards.”

“[The absence of people] adds a surreal aspect to the images, which appeals to me,” Kennedy says. “You question whether they’re real or not.”

The clearing of vegetation for farming in Western Australia had an unintended consequence: Without deep root networks to soak up rainfall, water was able to filter down to massive underground salt deposits. When the water table rose, that salt came to the surface and began increasing the salinity of the area’s ground.