Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios [Irritable], 1996, wall installation with drywall, shoes, cow bladder and surgical thread (four niches), 116.8 × 170.2 cm, 46 × 67 in., photo courtesy Art Gallery of New South Wales
“In ‘Atrabiliarios’ Salcedo evokes absence and loss by using materials and processes that locate memory in the body. The viewer’s response is, in turn, emotional, even visceral, rather than purely intellectual. Niches cut into the plaster wall contain shoes as relics or attributes of lost people, donated by the families of those who have disappeared. Shoes are particularly personal items as they carry the imprint of our body more than any other item of clothing. She then sealed the niches with a membrane of cow bladder, which she literally sutured into the plaster of the wall as if picturing the literal process of internalised bodily memory. Barely visible through the animal skin membrane, the shoes are a haunting evocation of their absent owners and inevitably recall the grizzly souvenirs of Nazi death camps.”
— Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006
Wooden doors, steel chair, and bone Three parts: 74⅞ x 39 x 18½ in. (190.2 x 99.1 x 47 cm); 62⅞ x 47 x 22 in. (159.7 x 119.3 x 55.8 cm); and 62½ x 38 x 18½ in. (158.7 x 96.5 x 46.9 cm) Collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, gift of Shawn and Peter Leibowitz, New York, to American Friends of the Israel Museum Photo: D. James Dee
“Salcedo’s interviews with displaced rural Colombian women forced out of their homes in search of safety resulted in the series La Casa Viuda. Doors without buildings, unmoored from their foundations, evoke the loss of home and lack of shelter that these families were forced to endure.The title of the series, roughly translated as “the widowed house,” furthers this sense of loss and disruption to the domestic sphere. Embedded within or joining the pieces of furniture, one finds other material remnants that evoke the human presence: a child’s toy chair, human bone, and articles of clothing. Using a strategy employed throughout her work, Salcedo creates uncanny experiences out of the seemingly familiar. As such, the house is transformed into a space of mourning.”—Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art
These are fantastic pictures – these are figments, these visions of friends in absence, grotesque, dropsical, vanishing at the first touch of the toe of a real boot.
I Love My Loveis a ballad by Helen Adam that was illustrated by Kiki Smith. Kalamazoo College is fortunate enough to have an edition of it in their Rare Books collection. The piece is an accordion fold book with eighteen panels, all of which are illustrated with original scans of Kiki Smith’s own hair, which is quite distinctive. The book was published in 2009 and is akin to her later work, which celebrates the lives of women in folklore and myth. Helen Adam’s ballad is based on a traditional celtic folk story with a somewhat medusa-esque theme. In the tale, a bride-groom murders his lover, whose hair continues to haunt him.
Little Bristling Soul 