Selva Aparicio

Lives and works in Chicago, IL, USA

Artist statement

Selva Aparicio is an interdisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, and performance to create artwork that digs deeper into ideas of memory, death, intimacy and mourning. Born and raised in the woods just outside of Barcelona, Spain, she found solace in nature from a young age and cultivated a profound interest in life and death as inspired by the natural world around her. Working with nature’s ephemera, including cicada wings, lettuce leaves, oyster shells and human cadavers, her praxis is an extended death ritual which foregrounds a particular reverence for the deceased and discarded. Aparicio’s keen perception of the meanings imbued in these materials and the rituals informing their sentimentality lends a unique perspective to her practice and allows her to present their reimagined forms not as entombments but rather as moments that capture both the donor’s and the artist’s labor to hold space and time for viewers to reckon with life, death, and human objecthood. Themes that have become increasingly complex as her personal and professional experiences more frequently intersect with global issues like climate change, overpopulation, and extinction. Through projects like Transformaciones, Remains, Integumentum, Hysteria, and memorialization efforts following the Barcelona terrorist attack of August 2017, her practice has evolved beyond the individual to encompass environmental, social, and political activism and evoke the change and rebirth she witnesses...

Artwork