Cathy de Monchaux

Description

This structure began over two years before the sculpture was completed, in the mind's eye of Cathy de Monchaux. She desired to make a place which was a sculpture and which was complete only when people came into it and conversed within its walls. Her reflective method of working has resulted in a building that is simple, assured and which looks from the outside to be a place without pretension, but with strength of line and solidity of form. Early ideas for this piece expressed in copious drawings and texts showed a more complex structure, spikily decorative and with notions of romance, of truths to be told and those which dare not be voiced. Through the long period of reworking her thoughts about this sculpture-place, Cathy de Monchaux eventually found that some constituents she had rejected - decorative pillars - which here are realised as simple vertical and horizontal members to support the glass sheets, were actually present in the form of reflections made by the screen which divides the space in two.

Like most of de Monchaux's work, Confessional is secretive: it hints at comfort - here is a place to rest, to recline and to converse. It is quiet inside, away from the hustle of the crowd, but you could easily damage your hand on the spikes which are part of repeated hand shapes forming the decorative screen. The screen itself is a metaphor for all that confuses communication. Is my truth your truth? Do you understand me? Do I know you? We appear to communicate, but do we really? This screen is also a fretwork of rusting steel, gaining a patina through age and use, qualities which de Monchaux desires and celebrates in her work. Confessional is a place to rest on a walk through Goodwood's twenty-acre grounds, to shelter and to talk.