I have wonderful parents. They aren’t physicians but they look for things for me that they think will make me better (or just be fun)! I love them and couldn’t ask for a more supportive family. When I worry that I don’t belong in medical school, they lift me back up. We a team.
“To create A Flor de Piel, Doris Salcedo sutured together hundreds of rose petals into a delicate shroud that undulates softly on the floor. Suspended in a state of transformation, the petals linger between life and death and are so vulnerable that they tear if touched. For Salcedo, fragility becomes the essence of the work as she sought to create an ‘image that is immaterial.’ The title is a Spanish idiomatic expression used to describe an overt display of emotions. While that meaning is lost when literally translated, the phrase a flor de piel links flowers and skin, suggesting a sensation so overwhelming that it is expressed physically through a coloring of the body’s surface.”
“A Flor de Piel looks more like flayed skin than rose petals. The piece is a large-scale blanket of what must amount to many, many thousands of petals and stitches which the press release describes – much better than I can – as ‘a shroud composed of sutured rose petals’. That word sutured seems apt. There is a sense of the bodily in its skin-like appearance and also a feeling of a surgical mending rather than a more domestic sewing together (though of course the two essentially amount to the same act).
“A blanket of rose petals sounds beautiful and gentle. Though this is undeniably beautiful, it’s a brutal beauty. The petals are stitched together but this is an unhealable wound. The feeling is more of torture than romance.”
