Rei Naito
Japan b.1961

pillow for the dead 1998
Silk organza, thread
Purchased 1999. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant

Rei Naito’s pillow for the dead 1998 offers a quiet memorial to those who have no-one to mourn their passing. This tiny cushion of air woven in delicate organza and thread, small enough to fit in your palm, is fragile and almost weightless but absolutely precious – qualities the artist amplifies by presenting it alone, cradled by a pedestal within a larger volume of space.

Naito’s pillow is an extension of Being Called 1997, a larger installation of 304 pillows she laid at the foot of the fifteenth-century murals in Frankfurt’s Carmelite Monastery which chronicle the persecution of the order throughout Europe. Here the lone pillow extends the notion of commemoration to anyone whose suffering has gone unacknowledged. The work’s miniature, gossamer form is a metaphor for the fragility of our existence.