Artist book, print, and memoir.

Miel para las heridas (Honey for the wounds), 2025
Erika Morillo in collaboration with Letra Muerta Inc. and Jay Seven Studio.
4.3 x 2.7 x 1″
Honey, giclée print, acrylic box.
Edition of 24, special Booklyn box set edition of 7, designed and fabricated by Kristen Leonard
 
Morillo narrates that when traveling to Cuba, she noticed altars were made not only for the dead but for the living as a way to mend their broken relationships. At times, the altar offerings included cubes of sugar or a few spoonfuls of honey.
Inspired by these altars and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s psychomagic exercises, the artist made this special edition where she submerges her mother’s photo in an attempt to transform and repair. This image is meant to change over time.
 
Miel para las heridas is one of the various experiments Morillo carried out to resignify her family’s photo archive, and also speak to an absence, in both the archive itself and in her relationship with her mother. At the center of this artist book is a studio portrait that also serves as the punctum in a photograph with the same title. The artist rephotographed her mother’s image submerged in a jar of honey.

“Honey. An organic substance that mutates with movement and temperature. At times, it’s fluid and loose; in other instances, hardened into crystals. As this photograph sits inside, it mutates as well. The resulting image is not predictable.” — Erika Morillo

Mother Archive: Dominican Family Memoir, 2024
Erika Morillo, published by University of Iowa Press.
Offset, 250 pages.
 
A family murder kept secret, the mysterious disappearance of her father, the systematic erasing of family photographs, a turbulent relationship with her mother, layers of trauma and abuse. In Mother Archive, Erika Morillo reconciles these demons of her past by searching for and seeking out the roots of her family. Intertwining memories with archival family photographs, news clippings, film stills, and artistic images, Morillo revisits her childhood growing up in the Dominican Republic, a place and time riddled with a history of violence and a tradition of erasure.
 
Spanning three generations across three different countries, this memoir works as a map in which the author traces incidents in her family history to help her understand herself and her own experience as a mother.