Material tensions: Doris Salcedo,
Unland: the orphan’s tunic, 1997.
Artwork
During a group crit, I was introduced to Doris Salcedo’s Unland: the orphan’s tunic (1997), an installation of mismatched halves of different tables of varying heights, cut and joined together through the careful stitching of human hair and raw silk. Threaded through thousands of drilled holes, these materials physically bind the surfaces while conceptually interlacing themes of rupture, loss, mourning, and memory (Tate, 2025).
The bodily materials of human hair, raw silk, and the fragile act of joining, imply a sense of stability, continuation or growth within the disrupted tables. Through this intervention, the wooden tables shift from inanimate objects into fragile, almost animate forms that continue to grow and breathe, perhaps in another dimension, an otherworldly time and space. For me, the piece reads as a spiritual passage, that unfolds not trough physical motion but through a transcendental continuation.
I am particularly drawn to the tensions between stability and fragility, between separation and connection, that fills the gallery with a charged material and emotional presence, where the domestic becomes a site that holds the delicate balance between rupture and continuation.
In my own practice, I explore how material and spatial dialogues can activate passage, physical, conceptual, and transcendental by transfiguring familiar domestic forms, rituals, and materials, into vessels of memory, reflection and belonging. I lay braids of human hair on piles of caraway seeds; weave my own hair into delicate silk-paj; join unfinished ceramic tiles or etched glass with braided horsehair, positioned on edges of tables or left in states of pause. Together with the scent of charred pine and caraway seeds, I aim to charge my installations with an otherworldly sense of transcendental mystery, ultimately contemplating how home may interlock within delicate overlays of passage, memory, and material connections.
Doris Salcedo, Unland: the orphan’s tunic, 1997. Wooden tables, silk, human hair and thread. 80 x 245 x 98 cm. Installation view. Photo by Perez Art Museum Miami.
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