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Doris Salcedo makes sculptures and installations that function as political and mental archaeology, using domestic materials charged with significance and suffused with meanings accumulated over years of use in everyday life. Salcedo often takes specific historical events as her point of departure, conveying burdens and conflicts with precise and economical means.

Doris Salcedo

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Doris Salcedo

Born 1958 Bogota, Columbia

Video on her heritage

https://www.sfmoma.org/watch/doris-salcedo-on-her-colombian-heritage/

Salcedo’s work gives form to pain, trauma, and loss, while creating space for individual and collective mourning. These themes stem from her own personal history. Members of her own family were among the many people who have disappeared in politically troubled Colombia. Much of her work deals with the fact that, while the death of a loved one can be mourned, their disappearance leaves an unbearable emptiness.

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Doris Salcedo

“The way that an artwork brings materials together is incredibly powerful. Sculpture is its materiality. I work with materials that are already charged with significance, with meaning they have required in the practice of everyday life…then, I work to the point where it becomes something else, where metamorphosis is reached.”

Watch public works

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdt2vZ9YpwE

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A Flor de Piel

2011 - 2012

Rose petals and thread

Dimensions variable

Photo: Ben Westoby

http://whitecube.com/artists/doris_salcedo/

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Untitled

2013

Cloth shirts, metal rebars and plaster in 5 parts

Overall dimensions: 70 3/16 x 90 15/16 x 10 3/8 in. (178.3 x 231 x 26.3 cm)

Photo: Oscar Monsalve Pino

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Untitled, 1989–90 View larger

Cotton shirts, steel, and plaster

67 × 18 × 10 in. (170.9 × 45.9 × 25.5 cm)

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http://www3.mcachicago.org/2015/salcedo/works/atrabiliarios/

Atrabiliarios

�In the early 1990s, Salcedo researched the lasting effects of violence through extensive fieldwork across Colombia. During this time, she learned that female victims were treated with particular cruelty and that shoes were often used to identify remains—especially in the context of los desaparecidos (the disappeared).

In Atrabiliarios, worn shoes—primarily women’s—are encased in niches embedded into the gallery wall, covered by a layer of stretched and preserved animal fiber, and affixed to the wall with medical sutures. The empty boxes are also made of animal fiber and seem to anticipate more deaths to come. The semitranslucent surfaces of the niches obscure their contents, alluding to the fraught relationship between memory and time.

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Colombian artist Doris Salcedo was awarded the inaugural Nasher Prize from the Nasher Sculpture Center for her influence in the field of sculpture. Over the past 30 years, Salcedo has created sculptures and installations using ordinary objects—such as chairs, shoes, roses and bricks—as declarations of loss and tribute.

Watch

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/colombian-sculptor-doris-salcedo-wins-nasher-prize-n437811