“[Doris] Salcedo makes no claim that mourning will change the world, or even that art in itself suffices to enable mourning. The obsessive repetition that marks her work suggests rather the melancholia of an endless Penelopean persistence. There’s an infinity of repeated microscopic gestures that slowly reveal themselves at the textural surface of the work. Sometimes this materialises itself as a literal tracery of stitches, as if the mourning process—Freud describes this process in explicitly textile terms as a step by step unpicking or unravelling of the libidinal ties that bind us (knüpfen) to the lost object—is being interminably thwarted or protracted. And there’s an endless stream of objects, as if the warehouse of abandoned furniture is constantly being replenished. This is not only because the supply of corpses is seemingly limitless.”

Rebecca Comay, “Material Remains: Doris Salcedo,” The Oxford Literary Review 39.1 (2017), 44.