A Flor de Piel
Doris Salcedo
A Flor de Piel
12 feet 2 13/16 inches x 92 1/16 inches
Rose petals and thread
2011-12
“Since the mid-1980s, Doris Salcedo has addressed the effects of criminal and political violence through sculptural works and installations that bear witness to death, loss, and pain. Collecting testimonies from individuals living in rural Colombia, she both honors the memory of lives lost and contemplates the frequently invisible nature of trauma.”
I first saw Salcedo’s work in person at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in the late Summer of 2011 during the exhibition ICA Collection Sep 3, 2011-Mar 4, 2012.
On November 2nd, 2016 I was fortunate enough to see Doris Salcedo speak at the Harvard Art Museum. This was the opening celebration for her exhibition The Materiality of Mourning. It was on view November 4th 2016 - April 9th 2017.
“Salcedo describes A Flor de Piel as a shroud, an offering of flowers to a Colombian nurse who was kidnapped and tortured to death. Composed of thousands of treated, preserved, and hand-sewn rose petals—the most fragile material the artist has yet employed—the work forms an expansive, delicate textile that uncannily evokes the victim’s body beneath the rumpled drapery. Salcedo devised a way to force this fugitive matter to remain suspended in time, neither dead nor alive, fresh nor withered. The petals are the color of drying blood, their veins, edges, and sutures marking the surface like creases, freckles, and scars on skin. This skin made of roses presents an ephemeral materiality: not quite an object, but a performative expression of the absent body; almost within reach, but ultimately impossible to touch in its impermanence.”
There is a poignant sense of grief and loss when viewing theses works. Salcedo’s creation of this rose fabric and use of silk in her Disremembered pieces recalls how adept cloth is at expressing pain.
A Flor de Piel runs parallel to “Cosmia” in my mind.
“Dried rose petals, red brown circles, frame your eyes and stain your knuckles.”
Within the creation of the rose shroud as an object of protection and and the navigation of loss in “Cosmia”, there is a harmonization between becoming and ending. A conversation begins between the living and death. I cannot prevent, but I can protect.