Cathy de Monchaux, the Turner Prize-nominated artist, created a public sculpture in 2018 celebrating the College’s tradition of learning and research. The 35-foot-tall bronze sculpture shows a vertical column of open books set into the fabric of the building.
The sculpture is positioned at the entrance to the College’s Dorothy Garrod building facing Sidgwick Avenue and is the first thing that students and visitors will see.
Instead of words, within each of the books a vine-like structure is embedded in the pages. The spine of each open book holds a female figure gazing out at the world.
The artist’s inspiration for the sculpture came from Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929), itself based upon a lecture given by Woolf to the students of Newnham and Girton Colleges in 1928. The essay explores the conditions that can promote women’s creativity: one of them being the freedom to gaze out on the world, to stand still, think and dream.
Says Cathy de Monchaux: ‘I find in my own creative process, when I am somehow overfilled by my thoughts and confused about how to move forward, I can only unravel what I am trying to create when I find a way to stand back and draw breath. It is the hardest thing to arrive at – a condition where you have so much in your mind that you become for a moment ‘beyond thinking’ – and somehow, an answer or inspiration of how to move forward in an idea comes to you. It is not a condition you can manufacture, as Virginia Woolf explained. For women, it was a question of having the right social and educational conditions to allow the space for inspirational thought to grow.’