Doris Salcedo – Colombian artist honouring the dead

Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo is one of the most significant Latin American artists working today. For the last thirty years she has been making pieces on the theme of mourning. Her latest work is no exception, an installation, called Palimpsest, that honours those who died during the ongoing migrant crisis. The names of the dead appear and disappear through water droplets that emerge out of stone. An immense technical challenge, the effect is that the stone appears to weep the names of those who died. Palimpsest is heading to London, where it will be showing at White Cube Bermondsey from September 2018. In this programme, long term friend Tim Marlow joins Doris at the peak of the installation process, in the final weeks before the piece is first opened to the public at the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid, for unique access into the creative thinking behind her work.

(Photo Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo. Credit: David Heald)