Erotic Pillows are more than just imprints; Barbara Falender went beyond that first impulse. The sculptures become corporeal in the process of their creation. They retain the character of a pillow, its shape and size, but at the same time become fetishes under the artist’s chisel. Folds and bumps begin to resemble fragments of the human body. Sometimes one might even recognise the imitated body parts – a knee or a belly appears here and there, while one of the Pillows looks like female and male genitalia during sexual intercourse. This is probably why Jacek Waltoś once called them audacious. But what if it is simply our imagination hinting at these associations? Maybe it is just the allure of these shapes that causes us to interpret them in this way?
The artist had been intrigued by this theme for a longer while. She sculpted the first Pillows in clay at the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko. They served her in creating casts in a synthetic material – epoxy resin, with which she worked at the time. In Carrara, Falender carved them in marble. Later on, she also created bronze and porcelain versions. Some of them are therefore brittle, fragile, and prone to damage and need to be very carefully handled, while others have been made out of hard stone.
The epoxy Pillows were corporeal, they became fetishes, encouraging to hold them in hands, marbles were heavy and inaccessible, bronzes – shiny and cold, and porcelains – fragile as an egg shell, not for touching. – the artist said.
Erotic Pillows, created in 1973-1974, were among the first works by Falender and were somewhat an announcement of her future sculptural explorations. In June 1972, the artist defended her diploma project at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw – Portrait of a Selected Community: People from Krakowskie Przedmieście, prepared under Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz’s supervision. In 1973, whilst working on the clay Pillows in Orońsko, she was simultaneously taking her first steps in stone carving.
It was the works in marble, often combined with bronze casts, which eventually became Falender’s trademark. The theme usually remained the same – adoration of the body with its beautiful and erotic potential. One could describe those works as showing bodies in sheets of marble. The famous Full Moon (1976) shows female legs sitting on a sheet, complemented by a pink phallic form. In Między jawą a snem (Between Dreams and Reality – editor’s translation) (1977), a pink marble leg creates tempting folds in a grey marble sheet.
The common feature of many of these sculptures is their horizontal orientation, which puts them in common with a bed, linens, or a sexual position. Falender also finds an interesting analogy with the very process of creating a sculpture and carving in stone:
Vertical carving is the hardest task. In this position, the stone rejects, resists. Whereas if you lay it down – it behaves like a woman – it surrenders, begins to cooperate, accepts you.