Cathy de Monchaux

I often get lost…in forests and streets; my innate lack of direction often leaves me in a sick panic, angry at myself, marching forward, wrongly, into an abyss of lateness and fear. I don’t need to sleep to enact this in my dreams, it’s all too real.

Like the characters in fairy tales, my crumbs of information are always eaten by the birds.

As a city dweller I have a deep yearning for the countryside and forests, imagining myself being at one with nature – raw damp earth beneath my feet – awakening my inner lizard brain and making me invincible as I talk to the trees.

Instead I pound pavements of safe concrete covered in gum; the forest for me is a metaphor for a kind of freedom mixed a kind of fear.

From my London studio window I see only four trees; I‘ve watched them grow from saplings, buffeted by traffic pollution and careless vandals above ground, below ground I imagine their roots growing into the infrastructure and drains and internet cables…Steadily and quietly defying and destroying us as a payback for our human recklessness. Cathy de Monchaux 2024

De Monchaux was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1998 for her solo show at the Whitechapel Gallery and her work is held in public and private collections across the world, including the Tate and the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington DC. She is to have a retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2026.

**1984 Unicorn** 2025
Bronze; 25 x 38 cm
Edition of 12 (6 sold)

1984 Unicorn is a significant new work by British artist and sculptor Cathy de Monchaux. Originally created in 1984, shortly after leaving art school, the sculpture was constructed based on the size of a pony: “I made him by hanging strings from the pipes on the ceiling and literally drew him in the air with simple materials, cane, cardboard and tissue paper, gradually building up the strength in his legs and body until I could release the strings holding him up.” Due to the technical restrictions of casting such a complex shape, inside and out, at that time (and therefore the inevitable destruction of the original) the work was preserved in its original form and kept in the artist’s London studio for decades, almost as a personal talisman.

Ever present, albeit peripherally, in her working life since then (“….a large and strange creature that I really have yet to fathom myself”), by 2024, technology had progressed so far as to enable her to return to it. Two days of non-stop digital scanning of every ”pore” allowed for a completely precise 3D-printed mould to be fashioned, enabling the piece to be cast finally in bronze using the traditional lost wax method.

This version represents the second life of the artwork - both a faithful rendering of the artist’s original vision and a magical revival forged from technological progress and contemporary alchemy. And what is more, aside from the domestically friendly edition, a full size iteration is now feasible; a bronze unicorn, lifesize (?) at some 14.2 hands, to grace and bewitch any environment.