“The beautiful strangeness of her (steel sculpture) work in this show is also deeply enigmatic; its impact rests more on associations generated than on its formal presence.

These associations, which range the spectrum from botanical to mineral, are given coherence through Castillo’s manner of juxtaposing conceptual opposites. In direct and undramatic fashion, she skillfully and deliberately pairs elegance and clumsiness, thick and thin, old and new, mass and linearity.

There are no flat surfaces in Castillo’s work, no interest in geometry or other Platonic forms of perfection. She shares the geologists’s/biologist’s fascination with the aggregate form of growth and formation and uses this phenomena both as a way of generating composition as well as for what it represents as metaphor.”

—Kathleen Whitney for SCULPTURE NEWS, Autumn, 2001