Invited artist: SELVA APARICIO
Wonder
forged iron, leather, Cordovan ink
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My piece references the womb, which in my experience is so much a place of wonder and speaks of time and uncertainty. The wish bone and the little balls are of forged iron, made to mimic the Taconite Iron Ore Pellets that gave birth to them
Selva Aparicio is an interdisciplinary artist exploring ideas of memory, intimacy, and the temporality of life through installations that celebrate the cyclicity of the natural world. Working with nature’s ephemera, including cicada wings, oyster shells, and human cadavers, her practice is an extended death ritual which foregrounds a unique reverence for the discarded. Capturing the meanings imbued in these materials and the rituals informing their significance and sentimentality enables both the facilitation of environmental, social, and political activism through art and the creation of outlets for the public navigation of grief and mourning in a world so defined by loss.
Selva Aparicio is an interdisciplinary artist working across installation and sculpture to create artwork that digs deeper into ideas of memory, 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 the ephemeral as inspired by the natural world around her.
She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015 and her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2017. Aparicio’s work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago; Yale Center for British Art; Can Mario Museum, Spain; CRUSH Curatorial, New York; The Kyoto International Craft Center, Japan; Instituto Cervantes, New York; and the Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona.
She was awarded the JUNCTURE Fellowship in Art and International Human Rights in 2016, the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize in 2017, and received a MAKER Grant from theChicago Artist Coalition in 2020. She was also named one of the 2020 breakout artists in Chicago by NewCity Art and is the Chicago Artadia 2022 award recipient.