CATHRYN MONRO

Every Day, 2018
Cast cement, white titanium dye
6100 x 800 x 300mm
Price on request

Every Day is a work about longing - a longing to transcend the mundane of everyday life by recognising that each moment offers an opportunity to enact greater values and progress toward a greater experience of being alive.

Monro explains that the pillows can be interpreted as “many rising steps, as an external manifestation of an internal desire to transcend ourselves, to rise toward greater knowledge, to rise above the mundane and experience life as profound and meaningful. I am interested both in the notion of ascension, the human desire to better ourselves, and in the climb, the act of getting there, the daily step by step, and the effort of it. Certainly as a mother of young children “the daily step by step” was central in my experience.”

The pillow itself most obviously connotes a preoccupation with sleep; a lack of sleep, hours trying to get children to sleep, aching for sleep, longing for sleep. The pillow also evokes an interior life, a world of private murmurings, a world of hopes and fears, dreams and anxieties. It is a close object, intimate and private, attendant to our whisperings and dreams. The pillow is familiar and domestic. It is comfort and home. It is deeply personal, yet so commonplace as to escape our attention as anything other than ordinary.

Placed outside in the landscape this familiar form is out of place, evoking the vulnerability of one observed while sleeping. Each pillow is indented with the weight of a sleeping body, its solid cementitious form simultaneously inviting and denying rest.