Selva Aparicio in her studio/Photo: Frank Geiser

There is an ocean’s distance between the importance of a teddy bear and my teddy bear, between a cat and my cat, between a place where someone lived and a place where I lived. Sentimental things are made valuable by the currency of memory. Memories are the building blocks of storytelling. Storytelling is the mortar of meaning. We are all beholden to the visceral reality of tissues, sinews and organs, but the memory stored in these tissues is a funny thing: It traverses through time and space, lives in architecture built entirely of blurry fragments, scribbles in the margins of the stories we carry with us, and lands within rooms we haven’t occupied in years to rest on the carpet. We live in the memories of other people, and this version of ourselves can outlive us.

Chicago-based artist Selva Aparicio uses careful preservation of discarded or displaced things in her artworks to question and celebrate memories contained within them. Aparicio’s upcoming solo exhibition “In Memory Of” at DePaul Art Museum will be the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date.

Aparicio, like many contemporary artists, works with a broad range of different processes and materials. In one artwork she painstakingly sews cicada wings together; in another she cements thousands of dandelion seeds to the surface of discarded objects. Visiting Aparicio’s studio, I am inundated by the array of carefully collected materials resting on tables and storage racks, leaning against the wall and hanging from the ceiling. Huge windows illuminate mockups for future artworks alongside a collection of fragments and ephemera from past installations, drawings pinned to the wall live next to plaster casts, and a taxidermied house cat sits below a suspended collection of beehives and wasp nests. Aparicio explains that Momo, the taxidermied cat, was her family’s cat when she was younger. A medical emergency required veterinarians to amputate the cat’s ears near the end of its life, but it was later determined that Momo also had a brain tumor. As we discuss whether it would have been kinder to put the cat down instead of trying new medical treatments, Aparicio lays out a grid of paired objects on the table: small pieces of moss, flowers or twigs that could serve as replacements for Momo’s missing ears.

“Ears for Momo”/Photo: Frank Geiser

Care and preservation aren’t always the same impulse, but the materials in Aparicio’s work have the greatest impact when they are salvaged or rescued. As we talk, Aparicio picks up a partially deflated soccer ball and holds it close to her stomach; saying, “This soccer ball was placed by a child’s grave. When it was going to be thrown out, I brought it here. There’s so much that a soccer ball can speak to, so many dreams that a child can put into it.” She returns it to the top of its studio pedestal: an artwork made from castings from Aparicio’s time spent studying in the Anatomy Lab at Yale University during her MFA.

A soccer ball in Selva Aparicio’s studio resting on top of an artwork titled “Si buscas milagros, mira”/Photo: Frank Geiser

One of the things that I want to delve into is the time that you spent in the Yale Anatomy Lab. When I think of artists studying in an anatomy lab, especially since I attended a somewhat classical undergrad program, there’s more of an assumption that we’re going to learn anatomy so we can draw muscles or bones or other anatomical details better. I feel like most of the takeaways I see in your work are different from that.

During my studies at Yale I was introduced to the Anatomy Lab in a class taught by Melinda Ring. It was a short introduction, but it changed the course of my whole MFA. I knew it was a natural progression of my work, so I applied for an independent study to work with Dr. William Stewart—a doctor who believed in art as a form of research.

He was uniquely respectful of the bodies. He didn’t ever refer to them as cadavers, for example, he called them donors. I learned so much from him, from dissecting to observing to learning ways to respectfully treat a body after life. After training I was given a lot of freedom in conducting my own work, and I took full advantage of that privilege, returning over and over, even after graduating.

Of course, when medical students are studying anatomy, the goal is often to desensitize themselves to bodies and death. Aparicio strives for the opposite effect. Her process requires an exacting sensitivity, where little is covered up or shrouded. I suspect Aparicio was just as fascinated by the chance to study the physical anatomy of bodies as she was to honor the psychological complexity of feelings embodied by each donor’s decision to cede their remains to people who will still benefit from them.

The prevailing mentality in medicine is to treat cadavers with depersonalized anonymity; practitioners often try to distance themselves from the lives that occupied these bodies by simplifying them into physical material. Aparicio’s approach instead sees these bodies as a profoundly personal expression of autonomy. I found this to have a strong impact because my mother taught university courses in an anatomy lab. I’ve seen firsthand how the medical approach to anatomical studies is a useful one rooted in reverence and respect, but I also appreciate how Aparicio’s artwork complicates this approach and reasserts the humanity of donors who enable it to exist.

A picture of Selva Aparicio and Dr. William Stewart in Yale University’s Gross Anatomy Lab in 2016 /Original Photo: Danna Singer

Aparicio completed several series during her studies in the Anatomy Lab, including hundreds of drawings and a burial shroud of hand-collected oyster shells tied together with wax thread. A series of castings of the creases, folds and indents from cadavers’ bodies completed during this time directly informs a monumental public installation, still in progress, that will be made from cast bronze in Belgium.

So for works like the castings that you’re doing in Belgium and the vulnerability you talked about: Do you see this as a way to incorporate people’s stories, like a celebration of sorts? Or do you view it as stories that are inaccessible? I guess what I’m trying to ask is whether you think of this work as something that is present or something that is gone.

It’s in constant change. In a way the piece is alive because the casts are made from humans who are alive right now—people aged from four to 110 years old. It’s created some very beautiful moments. I was in an elderly home, and a daughter with her mom who was about to pass were there. I made a casting from both of them.

In a way this piece is also at rest. After the work is finished there will be a place to sit with all 4,984 bronze tiles that were individually cast from the hands of people from the city where the work is placed. By the time this daughter sits on it her mom will be dead, and she knows that. She knows that within the castings her mom is there. She doesn’t necessarily know which casting, but it doesn’t matter. We will be sitting here, relaxed, at rest, but as the years go on more people in this piece will have passed.

Drawing mock-up of “childhood memories” taped to the wall in Selva Aparicio’s studio. The red figure drawn on the mock-up is a copy from one of Aparicio’s childhood drawings.

In my own studio there are certain materials that feel a little too personal to work with. Maybe I feel it would be disrespectful to change or transform these materials into artworks, especially ones that get shared in exhibitions. Aparicio’s work seems to start from a need to work with materials that feel both precious and precarious, but each of her artworks use physically demanding or tedious processes to shape and assemble these materials at monumental scale. I see this dedication to the labor and craft of her works as a form of respect, admiration or even awe. Repetitive marks, stitches and scores become a form of meditation on their material importance, allowing both the artist and viewer to ruminate on the immense stories contained within little things.

For an artwork titled “Remains,” Aparicio collected leaves of lettuce that were discarded from a grocery store near her home. These leaves were then dried, pressed and assembled into the shape of a stained-glass rose window from the “Cathedral of Santa Maria del Pi” in Barcelona, Spain. The lettuce leaves degraded over time, losing color and contrast in the process, but it is a really beautiful aspect of the work. “Remains” is a gentle reminder that all things age, but the leaves’ subtle, veiny transparency also reminds us to appreciate the things that need time to develop. All of Aparacio’s artworks feel redemptive in this way; inspiration for her processes waits to strike until the moment after things have been discarded, pushed aside or forgotten about.

Aparicio’s artworks are also intensely connected to her lived experiences. This is true for any artist, but Aparicio’s artworks are personal in ways that I find uniquely challenging and cathartic. This is especially present in a work titled “Childhood Memories,” consisting of an ornamental rug pattern carved directly into a wooden floor.

Detail of “Childhood Memories” from Selva Aparicio’s MFA thesis exhibition in 2017/Photo: Selva Aparicio

I’m excited to hear the rug piece is going to be in your exhibition. From what I understand it hasn’t been displayed since 2017?

Yes! During my MFA. It was the first time I had my own studio and could do my own work. It was also the first time I had healthcare, so I went to therapy. I started to realize my whole art practice since the beginning was really interconnected to my own personal experience, which is probably the case for everyone, but I guess I didn’t really want to accept that.

For my thesis piece, I flew to my old house because I kept remembering this rug. It was the only object that was in mom’s house my entire life. I had a lot of memories in that specific room, a lot of them were not very good, and that rug became a weave of all those memories put together. It was a witness of my past.

Oh so it was carved by hand!? I thought it was machined somehow.

No no no, it was hand-carved! So, speaking of that piece it is fifteen by ten feet. Carving this rug was, like, going through the process of unveiling all those memories and of processing them for myself. It was kind of a selfish piece in a way, and it was very cathartic.

Aparicio’s recent stint as the Theodore International Randall Chair in Sculpture at Alfred University in New York allowed her to create a series of glass artworks derived from patterns on window security grates. Much of Aparicio’s work for “In Memory Of” can be understood within the context of domestic violence, and making these grates in glass is a blunt, but important reminder that these barriers are deceptively decorative when safety inside the house isn’t guaranteed.

Interior spaces represented in Aparicio’s work are psychologically charged and often physically unstable. Carving an artwork into the floor can also be read as an attempt to weaken it, and the walls, ceilings and windows in her constructed spaces all seem similarly suspect. “Hysteria,” an installation that Aparicio completed for the International Museum of Surgical Science, comes to mind. In it, a hospital curtain made from thorny stems strung together with thin metal wire surrounds a gynecological exam table. “Hysteria” demonstrates Aparicio’s aptitude for direct confrontation with traumatic and disquieting subject matter; the jagged curtains sharply contextualize historical gynecology within the pain of enslaved and marginalized women who suffered in establishing it. Interiority functions differently in this work; looking through the gaps in this curtain enables the viewer to see that each stem has been painstakingly sawed in half lengthwise to keep any thorns from pointing inwards. To the outside world, the spiked curtain is a threatening or even grisly reminder, but Aparicio provides some protection for the curtain’s vulnerable inhabitant. I learned that the thorns for this curtain were all transported from Aparicio’s home country of Spain, which is a beautiful aspect of this work even if viewers aren’t aware of this element. Trust is an important part of the viewer’s experience; Aparicio “has faith in the viewers: That they somehow can get more out of the work than they are consciously aware of.”

I appreciate that even when working with materials that have a strong sense of history—objects that belonged to a specific person or came from a specific place or were cared for in a specific way—Aparicio’s experiences still inform the way she works with them. When translated from Basque, Aparicio’s mother’s name means “thorns.”

This demonstrates the fundamental strength of Aparicio’s work. Her unflinching contemplation of death, trauma and loss is rooted in a desire to implicate herself in moments of vulnerability. What makes Aparicio’s work unique is not the dark, heavy themes that permeate her installations, but rather the honest empathy that enables her meticulous processes within them.

Selva Aparicio’s solo exhibition “In Memory Of” will be on view at DePaul Art Museum, 935 West Fullerton, from March 14 – August 4.

Interview sections of this article have been edited for grammar and formatting in consultation with the artist.