Typically affiliated with domesticity, bodily comfort, and intimacy, the pillow can be found in virtually every human endeavor and culture, ranging in size, material expression, and purpose. Through a shift in scale and material concern, Bartholdi’s Pillow considers the relationship between monumentality and nature through a more familiar object–that of an immense pillow. Evoking Claes Oldenburg’s study of the monumental and the everyday, and the colossal engineering work of Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, Bartholdi’s Pillow proposes a full-scale pillow based on templating a portion of the Shawangunk Mountains, a range found in upstate New York.

Bartholdi’s Pillow registers a geological condition through a process of upholstery. A large slipcover, the pillow uses performance textiles to deploy techniques aligned with domestic craft, such as quilting, upholstery, and patternmaking and to combine cartographic techniques of mapping three-dimensional surfaces. By familiarizing and softening a monumental aspect of nature, Bartholdi’s Pillow affords an interaction that is normally apprehended as a distant view. As a full-scale topographic map, Bartholdi’s Pillow brings a direct experience of the formidable landscape of NY State to the general public.