Albrecht Dürer sure drew a mean Rhino, but have you ever seen his pillows? We found this wonderful post on the Public Domain Review today.
“On the verso side, we find a composition brought to life in another way — six pillows, contorted into the shape of fitful sleep, which seem to slip between the waking world and the stuff of dreams. There is the same spatial ambiguity of the recto: the hatching on the first two pillows extends beyond their borders to become shadows on the page, while the other cushions float in a depthless vacuum. No countenance of the artist features here, but if you look long enough, the cushions’ folds may assume the contours of distorted faces. “Once set in motion”, writes Joseph Leo Koerner, “this game of ‘seeing as’ can be played indefinitely, transforming corners into noses, chins, or satyrs’ horns, and creases into mouths and brows, until each pillow is animated by a number of hypothetical masks frowning, laughing, fretting, and speaking”. The drawings take the German word for pillow, Kopfkissen(headpillow), literally, fashioning Kissen into Kopf.“
Not only are we fantasising about collecting pillow-based artworks in honour of the beauty of sleeping in late during the winter months, but the post also reminded us of our wonderful interview with Tim Marlow. It’s one of the most moving Gilded Birds interviews we’ve ever done.
“Most mornings when I go in to wake my son up or when he’s already got up I notice this space that’s been left. I remember once smelling it and it’s the most beautiful thing. I also realised that it’s clearly linked in my mind to my father who I held when he died. My mother and brother were there too and being there during the moment of death was the most extraordinarily moving thing. If you had to plan a death that’s probably how it should be. He looked around and saw my mother and relaxed knowing that she was there. I was holding his hand and he just sank back into the pillow on his bed. I never saw the trace of his head on that pillow but it slightly haunted me that feeling of death and the body sinking back into the pillow. My son’s three and when I look at the trace of his head it’s there, the life cycle: the fact that this is the imprint of a young head whose life is ahead of him and yet there’s still the inevitability of death.”
GILDED BIRDS 