Doris Salcedo
This year I have been looking at further extending my work with family photos and also using found photos, demonstrating the difference of emotion that can be achieved through the significance of the photos used in an artwork.
Artist Doris Salcedo mostly works with objects donated to her from families with deep trauma to tell. I have been very interested in Salcedo, and chose to research her for my dissertation along with Christian Boltanski. I feel my work shows strong similarities to hers, not necessarily in the physicality but in the depth behind each piece.
Doris Salcedo, born 1958, is a Columbian born sculptor who lives and works in Bogota. Salcedo’s work is largely based on the political violence in her country, using testimonies of families who have had relatives disappear under the military regime. Members of Salcedo’s family were among the hundreds of people who disappeared.
I feel there are very strong comparisons between my work and Salcedo’s as she also very much focuses on identity and story-telling. Salcedo’s works are largely made up using objects owned by those who went missing. She creates these artworks to portray the feeling of loss and devastation that so many in her country have had to experience. We see this in ‘Unland: The Orphans Tunic’ (Fig 5 & 6), an installation I explored in my dissertation.
In this piece, as in many others of Salcedo’s, she deliberately deactivates the original purpose of the object, making them unfit for purpose. These mutations symbolise the impaired mourning that the families of the missing may be enduring.
This is a similar idea and theme that we go on to see later in my work; deactivating the significance of images so they no longer work for their original purpose.
