The pillow as subject seems to promise intimacy or rest, yet here it is only an idea of softness — neither emotionally nor materially transformed. Nothing is being done with it.
One of the techinal aspects of sculpture is the artist’s interaction with material — how stone becomes flesh, how metal can suggest pliancy, or how touch is rendered visible. In the case of a pillow sculpture, there’s a lost opportunity to explore tactility, resistance, and transformation. Mg point is that the work’s fragility reads as a lack of engagement. The material doesn’t invite exploration; it simply claims fragility to be content. In sculptural traditions texture embodies experience — the compression of skin, the fold of cloth — this piece stops at the surface.
The aesthetic effect is there but the content is lacking.
In sculpting the body, artists are always bound by a system of proportions, expectations, and recognitions — what a body should be.
A pillow, by contrast, belongs to the infinite: every crease or fold can be justified (although I don’t doubt his technical mastery). The pillow permits indifference for the artist, whatever is fine, there is no perfection to aim for.
And this might sound like I dislike minimalist or abstract art, I dont, its some if my absolute favourite.
The pillow’s surface suggests softness, but without a counterforce, softness remains pointless. In great sculpture, touch is relational — pressure against pressure. Here, there is no resistance, no gesture, no human tension. Softness without subject.
OK there is a fold at best.
Minimalism demands restraint, but without content it is empty. There is a lack of tension or narrative.
The pillow is inherently charged with intimacy — it bears the body as its purpose.
Again on its own, it is made sterile.
Any depth to the idea is forced.
I could argue for it, claiming the point is to show the existence of smth that is created for humans without any humanity. The fold shows the effect of a human but with no human there. We’re focusing on absence. But the sculpture isnt forcing this thought, I’m bringing everything into this myself.
just because its not a scantily clad lady doesn’t make the sculpture uninteresting. and art doesn’t need to be busy to make you feel.
Very disappointed thats what you think I’m asking for.
You write a lot here just to deny the artist the freedom to iterate on and perfect an idea. Just the fact that it’s difficult to make a realistic pillow out of stone seems to me to be an interesting premise. Let them be. It clearly interests them, and me too. I’d love to see a gallery full of those pillows.
At first glance, “Stone Pillow” might elicit a reaction rooted in oxymoronic tension—softness rendered unyielding, comfort contorted into a monolith of repose. But such a binary reading is only the first crack in the granite of its semiotic skin. This is not merely a pillow made of stone; it is a gesture, a symbolic pivot between support and burden, rest and resistance—the very material contradiction of modern existence.
The piece resists function as much as it invites it.
Stone, the primordial archive of time, here dons the costume of domesticity. It becomes a proxy for vulnerability, yet it refuses to yield. In this way, it mimics the psychological architecture of contemporary human subjectivity—the curated, performative stillness that masks tectonic shifts within. The audience is confronted with the absurdity of seeking solace in permanence, of nestling into the immovable.
There is an almost violent tenderness to it.
This is not comfort, but the idea of comfort—distilled, fossilized, rendered absurd in its attempt at translation. In its inert solidity, the pillow becomes a monument to the failure of softness, a kind of anti-cradle. One cannot rest here without bruising the very expectations they bring to the act of repose.
And let’s not ignore the phallocentric undercurrent of casting the intimate in stone—a petrification of the feminine, the domestic, the private sphere. Is the artist entombing comfort? Or are they elevating it, daring us to see rest not as surrender, but as resistance?
Of course, we must also consider the geological genealogy of the object. This is stone, yes, but not just any stone—a hunk of mineral ancestry, carrying within it the memory of pressure, eruption, erosion. In this context, the pillow becomes a reliquary of latent violence, repackaged in the form of a sleep aid. It is a sculpture that asks not to be touched, but to be dreamed of, in discomfort.
Ultimately, the Stone Pillow is a performative contradiction. It does not solve the problem of embodiment; it renders it absurd. It is not an object to be used, but a question to be inhabited.
The pillow’s meaning as the subject is for the artist to know and the person taking in the art to interpret based on their own lens of the world. your interpretation isn’t invalid, but it doesn’t invalidate any other’s interpretation either.
does art need to adhere to all these rules you’ve said? or are these simply your interpretations of the art.
you seem like bodies carved into marble and I think that’s wonderful. but it doesn’t mean marble should be only for that type of subject.
-“The pillow’s surface suggests softness, but without a counterforce, softness remains pointless. In great sculpture, touch is relational — pressure against pressure. Here, there is no resistance, no gesture, no human tension. Softness without subject.”
that’s an interesting point for sure, but I think aesthetic and warmth can come from the strangest examples. and I’d love to have one of these pillows because I find them interesting to look at. I also love the material choice for the pieces.
knowledge about form and material and lighting and what materials do and don’t do is wonderful. but none of it is needed to truly appreciate something.
-"The pillow is inherently charged with intimacy — it bears the body as its purpose. Again on its own, it is made sterile.
Any depth to the idea is forced."
oh god I don’t get intimacy from this at all. it seems that we just view this differently. and that is how it’s all meant to be!
-“Very disappointed thats what you think I’m asking for.”
I just meant that it doesn’t have to fit your view of the medium of choice and subject to be ‘good’.
also… do keep in mind this is on a meme post about thirst traps and images taken of marble sculptures from underbelly angles to make them appear sexy. lol
doesn’t have to be so heavy and serious all the time. the point of it is to make you feel.
marble is best for expressing the nuances of emotion. “Because of the material qualities of marble itself, it appears fragile. It’s quite fragile, but it’s not that fragile, and yet it appears so because of the translucency and pureness of the stone.” He added that it allows for sculpting at a very precise level, but that he tries “not to be too literal about it. I think that my main focus is to create an atmosphere, a sensation, more than a literal representation of something that expresses, for instance, fragility.”
I do like that. But again, one and done. Move on, explore that fragility in different ways.
I love the skill. But beyond doing it once I don’t get the artistic desire.
Dont you want to do smth interesting instead?
I think its interesting. and I love that they chose an every day object.
just because its not a scantily clad lady doesn’t make the sculpture uninteresting. and art doesn’t need to be busy to make you feel.
The pillow as subject seems to promise intimacy or rest, yet here it is only an idea of softness — neither emotionally nor materially transformed. Nothing is being done with it.
One of the techinal aspects of sculpture is the artist’s interaction with material — how stone becomes flesh, how metal can suggest pliancy, or how touch is rendered visible. In the case of a pillow sculpture, there’s a lost opportunity to explore tactility, resistance, and transformation. Mg point is that the work’s fragility reads as a lack of engagement. The material doesn’t invite exploration; it simply claims fragility to be content. In sculptural traditions texture embodies experience — the compression of skin, the fold of cloth — this piece stops at the surface. The aesthetic effect is there but the content is lacking.
In sculpting the body, artists are always bound by a system of proportions, expectations, and recognitions — what a body should be. A pillow, by contrast, belongs to the infinite: every crease or fold can be justified (although I don’t doubt his technical mastery). The pillow permits indifference for the artist, whatever is fine, there is no perfection to aim for. And this might sound like I dislike minimalist or abstract art, I dont, its some if my absolute favourite.
The pillow’s surface suggests softness, but without a counterforce, softness remains pointless. In great sculpture, touch is relational — pressure against pressure. Here, there is no resistance, no gesture, no human tension. Softness without subject.
OK there is a fold at best.
Minimalism demands restraint, but without content it is empty. There is a lack of tension or narrative.
The pillow is inherently charged with intimacy — it bears the body as its purpose. Again on its own, it is made sterile.
Any depth to the idea is forced.
I could argue for it, claiming the point is to show the existence of smth that is created for humans without any humanity. The fold shows the effect of a human but with no human there. We’re focusing on absence. But the sculpture isnt forcing this thought, I’m bringing everything into this myself.
Very disappointed thats what you think I’m asking for.
You write a lot here just to deny the artist the freedom to iterate on and perfect an idea. Just the fact that it’s difficult to make a realistic pillow out of stone seems to me to be an interesting premise. Let them be. It clearly interests them, and me too. I’d love to see a gallery full of those pillows.
At first glance, “Stone Pillow” might elicit a reaction rooted in oxymoronic tension—softness rendered unyielding, comfort contorted into a monolith of repose. But such a binary reading is only the first crack in the granite of its semiotic skin. This is not merely a pillow made of stone; it is a gesture, a symbolic pivot between support and burden, rest and resistance—the very material contradiction of modern existence.
The piece resists function as much as it invites it.
Stone, the primordial archive of time, here dons the costume of domesticity. It becomes a proxy for vulnerability, yet it refuses to yield. In this way, it mimics the psychological architecture of contemporary human subjectivity—the curated, performative stillness that masks tectonic shifts within. The audience is confronted with the absurdity of seeking solace in permanence, of nestling into the immovable.
There is an almost violent tenderness to it.
This is not comfort, but the idea of comfort—distilled, fossilized, rendered absurd in its attempt at translation. In its inert solidity, the pillow becomes a monument to the failure of softness, a kind of anti-cradle. One cannot rest here without bruising the very expectations they bring to the act of repose.
And let’s not ignore the phallocentric undercurrent of casting the intimate in stone—a petrification of the feminine, the domestic, the private sphere. Is the artist entombing comfort? Or are they elevating it, daring us to see rest not as surrender, but as resistance?
Of course, we must also consider the geological genealogy of the object. This is stone, yes, but not just any stone—a hunk of mineral ancestry, carrying within it the memory of pressure, eruption, erosion. In this context, the pillow becomes a reliquary of latent violence, repackaged in the form of a sleep aid. It is a sculpture that asks not to be touched, but to be dreamed of, in discomfort.
Ultimately, the Stone Pillow is a performative contradiction. It does not solve the problem of embodiment; it renders it absurd. It is not an object to be used, but a question to be inhabited.
Sleep here, and wake up elsewhere.
The pillow’s meaning as the subject is for the artist to know and the person taking in the art to interpret based on their own lens of the world. your interpretation isn’t invalid, but it doesn’t invalidate any other’s interpretation either.
does art need to adhere to all these rules you’ve said? or are these simply your interpretations of the art.
you seem like bodies carved into marble and I think that’s wonderful. but it doesn’t mean marble should be only for that type of subject.
-“The pillow’s surface suggests softness, but without a counterforce, softness remains pointless. In great sculpture, touch is relational — pressure against pressure. Here, there is no resistance, no gesture, no human tension. Softness without subject.”
that’s an interesting point for sure, but I think aesthetic and warmth can come from the strangest examples. and I’d love to have one of these pillows because I find them interesting to look at. I also love the material choice for the pieces.
knowledge about form and material and lighting and what materials do and don’t do is wonderful. but none of it is needed to truly appreciate something.
-"The pillow is inherently charged with intimacy — it bears the body as its purpose. Again on its own, it is made sterile.
Any depth to the idea is forced."
oh god I don’t get intimacy from this at all. it seems that we just view this differently. and that is how it’s all meant to be!
-“Very disappointed thats what you think I’m asking for.”
I just meant that it doesn’t have to fit your view of the medium of choice and subject to be ‘good’.
also… do keep in mind this is on a meme post about thirst traps and images taken of marble sculptures from underbelly angles to make them appear sexy. lol
doesn’t have to be so heavy and serious all the time. the point of it is to make you feel.
Maybe he’s an autistic artist & has a hyperfixated fascination with uncomfortable pillows.
marble is best for expressing the nuances of emotion. “Because of the material qualities of marble itself, it appears fragile. It’s quite fragile, but it’s not that fragile, and yet it appears so because of the translucency and pureness of the stone.” He added that it allows for sculpting at a very precise level, but that he tries “not to be too literal about it. I think that my main focus is to create an atmosphere, a sensation, more than a literal representation of something that expresses, for instance, fragility.”
I do like that. But again, one and done. Move on, explore that fragility in different ways.