'I began to conceive of works based on nothing' Jonathan Jones on how Doris Salcedo's art grew out of the horrors she witnessed

In 1858, in a speech that warned of imminent civil war between the anti-slavery northern and slave-owning southern states of the US, presidential hopeful Abraham Lincoln drew on the Bible to warn: "A house divided against itself will not stand." For Lincoln, the house whose terrible fissure will cause it to collapse unless something is quickly done is not just a psychological but a political metaphor. And that is how Salcedo means it, too.

Colombia in the 1980s, when Salcedo began making art, was as divided and violent as the 19th-century North America of Poe and Lincoln. Born in Bogotá in 1958, Salcedo insists her work is a direct expression of other people's suffering, rather than merely her own emotional response to it; indeed, that each work of art she makes is based on specific first-hand accounts from victims of violence and forced migration. It was specifically in trying to document and commemorate Colombian victims that she got interested in making holes and voids in buildings - voids whose significance isn't hard to decode.

Salcedo was in her 30s when her art really started to take shape. In 1985 she witnessed a horrific clash between guerrillas and the state that ended in people being burned to death in the occupied Palace of Justice in Bogotá: "It left its mark on me. I began to conceive of works based on nothing." Her response was to go to a hospital in Bogotá and collect dead patients' discarded shoes, which she put into cavities dug in a wall and veiled in a weblike fibre.

She has admitted that it is hard to learn and develop when you come from a place that, before the internet, seemed cut off from the rest of the world: "In a third-world country, one suffers from a lack of information." Later, she studied in New York, where she became interested in the art of Joseph Beuys, before returning to Colombia to teach. She is still based in Bogotá but travels widely as an artist - an important recent work was made for the Istanbul Biennial. She says her Tate Modern piece has to do with the experience of a migrant from a poor country in a rich western capital.

Jonathan Jones
The Guardian, Wednesday 10 October 2007