Her wooden rug invites jokes. Like: ‘This carpet no longer needs to be beaten’. In the art world, however, the work of Selva Aparicio is taken very seriously. This rug carved out of an oak floor, for example, is about ‘memories from my childhood’.
Selva Aparicio is an interdisciplinary artist with works that delve deeper into ideas about memory, death, intimacy and grief. Born and raised in the forests just outside Barcelona, Spain, she found comfort in nature from an early age and developed a deep interest in life and death, inspired by the natural world around her.
Wood is just one of the materials she works with. Other natural materials include cicada wings, lettuce leaves, oyster shells and even human cadavers…
She says about it herself: “I am inspired by the transience of life, loss and intimacy. My art reflects the hidden beauty found in the details of the natural world, and the realization that beauty can mask terrible things. I quietly observe and manipulate both living and dead objects, collecting and documenting their evolution.”
Covering and exposing
Her work does well; in the corona year 2022 she showed works in no less than ten exhibitions in Europe, the US and China. So anyone who wants to laugh at her carved-out rug would do well to count to ten and meanwhile look at her biography and list of Awards.
What Selva Aparicio herself says about her carved-out rug in an oak floor? “This work is about covering and exposing, about trauma and witnessing.”
