Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning

A compelling look at Doris Salcedo’s works from the past fifteen years, exploring how the artist challenges not only the limits of the materials she uses but also the traditions of sculpture itself

Colombian sculptor and installation artist Doris Salcedo (b. 1958) creates works that address political violence and oppression. This pioneering book, which focuses on Salcedo’s works from 2001 to the present, examines the development and evolution of her approach. These sculptures have pushed toward new extremes, incorporating organic materials—rose petals, grass, soil—in order to blur the line between the permanent and the ephemeral.

This insightful text illuminates the artist’s practice: exhaustive personal interviews and deep research joined with painstaking acts of making that both challenge limits and set new directions in materiality. Mary Schneider Enriquez convincingly argues for viewing Salcedo’s oeuvre not just through a particular theoretical lens, such as violence studies or trauma and memory studies, but for the profound way the artist engages with and expands the traditions of sculpture as a medium.