© Doris Salcedo

The familiar is made strange in Doris Salcedo’s sculptures, which respond to the traumatic experience of violence and human tragedy.

Many of Salcedo’s sculptures incorporate age-worn household objects such as chairs, tables and wardrobes, which the artist transforms into psychologically fraught assemblages. Combining these relics of domestic life with unorthodox materials such as cement or human hair, Salcedo creates poetic visual metaphors for the loss and trauma experienced by victims of violence. She describes such combinations of materials as similar to the aftermath of an explosion, in which everyday items are strewn together incongruously, producing ‘monstrous relationships’. She explains: ‘It is always the idea of something that is common, that we all recognise, turned into something that has undergone a process that is obviously violent.’

The starting point for Salcedo’s practice in the 1980s was the Civil War in Colombia, a conflict that has lasted intermittently since 1948. Her work is often based on extensive research into specific events and locations, sometimes involving interviews with the victims of war. However, rather than commenting solely on their Colombian context, the sculptures are evocative objects that relate to universal feelings of loss and mourning.

Salcedo often employs deliberately time-consuming processes such as tying delicate animal fibre in Untitled or threading and cross-hatching human hair in Unland: audible in the mouth. These patient methods pay homage to the lives wasted by violence and by the blind exertion of power around the world.

Doris Salcedo was born in 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia, where she lives and works. She will undertake the next work in the Unilever Series at Tate Modern for 2007.

Curated by Achim Borchardt-Hume