There are artists who work with paint, bronze, and marble—and then there is Selva Aparicio, who stitches together the cicada wings of summer, the discarded wreaths of the dead, and the letters of soldiers who feared they might never write again. Her work does not simply remember; it exhumes, tenderly and without sentimentality, the intimate artifacts of mortality and loss.

Born in Barcelona and now based between Chicago and upstate New York, Aparicio is an interdisciplinary artist whose installations and sculptures inhabit the fragile territory between life and its inevitable conclusion. For her, death is neither a curtain nor an erasure—it is a constant companion, a gardener in the cycle of growth and decay.

Crafting Memory from the Discarded

Aparicio’s practice is rooted in the gathering of materials that others overlook, avoid, or throw away: reclaimed cemetery decorations, human hair, dandelion seeds, palm prints, and even concrete tiles cast from the bodies of cadavers donated to science. She weaves, stitches, and carves these into works that are as meticulous as they are unsettling—handcrafted elegies that ask viewers to face mortality without flinching.

The intimacy begins in the act of collection. Whether sifting through cemetery trash bins for grave decorations or pressing palms into clay in Belgian fishing towns, Aparicio approaches each object as a witness to a life lived. She transforms them through processes passed down from her family’s craft heritage—a nurse’s steady hands from her mother, a surgeon’s precision from her father—into sculptures that feel both ancient and immediate.

War, Mourning, and the Landscape of Memory

In 2024, Aparicio served as artist-in-residence at In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium, responding to the museum’s vast collection of wartime artifacts. Her installation If I Write Again assembles nine canvas panels stitched from over a thousand letters exchanged between soldiers and loved ones, each seam visible, each narrative interlocking. Suspended as a tent within the museum, the work becomes both shelter and shroud—a place where language holds the weight of absence.

This was not her first Belgian commission. At the Beaufort Triennial, Aparicio unveiled At Rest, a bronze bench inlaid with thousands of palm prints from local residents. Facing the reclaimed waterfront, the work creates a space of quiet communion between viewer, nature, and the anonymous imprints of lives that, in time, will join the departed.

The Poetics of Material

Aparicio’s materials are rarely inert. In Ode to the Unclaimed Dead, a plywood coffin like those used for New York’s pauper burials is encrusted with dandelion seeds—symbols of hope—then elevated in a gilded frame, transforming municipal anonymity into something resembling sainthood. In Velo de Luto (Mourning Veil), thousands of Magicicada wings are woven with three generations of women’s hair, creating a fragile shroud that is as much about emergence as concealment.

These works reveal her central preoccupation: that beauty and horror are often tangled threads in the same weave. The glint of a cicada wing might shimmer like stained glass, yet it is made from a creature whose life is spent mostly underground, emerging only to mate and die.

Aparicio resists the taboo around death, approaching it instead as an ecological constant. “Amidst the chaos of my household, nature offered me peace, and art became a means of liberation,” she recalls. Her upbringing—on the wooded edge of Barcelona, in a community of artists, wanderers, and outsiders—instilled in her both a reverence for the natural world and a conviction that every discarded thing carries a story worth telling.

Now, with permanent public works in Europe, major exhibitions in the U.S., and recognition including the Burke Prize and the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Visual Arts, Selva Aparicio’s voice is unmistakable. She is not a mere chronicler of grief, but an alchemist of remembrance, turning remnants into revelations.

In her hands, the veil between life and death is not torn away—it is sewn, patiently, with thread spun from loss and light.