Editor of the The Offing’s Dead Letter Office, Leslie Parry, speaks to her current obsession with the first retrospective of Doris Salcedo’s art.
I can’t stop thinking about the Doris Salcedo retrospective at the MCA. Salcedo, a native of Colombia, creates sculptures from everyday materials: wood, cement, grass, furniture, human hair. They are elegies of absence, honoring those lost to political violence and civil unrest. Particularly haunting is A Flor de Piel, a funereal shroud composed of 250,000 rose petals, stitched together by hand.