Copywriting & Storytelling.   Yana Northen

about this project

The Silent Witness

I am 57 years old, and I have spent approximately one third of my life asleep. When I think about that figure, it feels strange to realise how much of my life I have spent with my head resting on a pillow. Throughout all these years, it has remained one of the few objects that has accompanied me for almost my entire life. This led me to think of the pillow as a silent witness to human life.

It is beside us during the hours when we are most often alone. We sleep on it, embrace it, press it against our bodies, cry into it, turn it over and fluff it, trying to find a comfortable position. It is present in moments of intimacy and loneliness, illness and comfort, fear, grief, desire and sleep. It accepts us as we are, without judgement, becoming a witness to the part of our lives that usually remains unseen by others.

The pillow carries the physical weight of our head and body and, metaphorically, the weight of what we carry within us. Yet all that becomes visible on its surface is a trace: a fold, a depression, crumpled fabric. Even this trace exists only briefly. It disappears, giving way to a new one the following night.

The project began with my own pillow. For 21 days, every morning immediately after waking, before touching it or making the bed, I photographed what remained on its surface from the night before. At the same time, I wrote down my first sensations on waking and how I had slept. This resulted in 21 photographs and 21 handwritten notes — traces of 21 nights.

I also brought my own body into the project, photographing the familiar movements we make as we go to sleep: lying down, turning, curling up, embracing the pillow and pressing it against the body. I use colour negative throughout this sequence to transform the familiar reality of the body and bedroom into an altered, unstable space associated with sleep. The sequence begins and ends in negative, creating a cyclical structure that suggests the recurring rhythm of night, sleep and waking.

In the final part of the work, I open the pillow — physically and metaphorically. First, its fabric and filling are exposed. Then personal objects, photographs, notes and fragments accumulated over a lifetime become its imagined contents — an attempt to reveal what this silent witness might hold if memory could take physical form.

I continue to work on the project, creating a photographic archive of pillows that I encounter in everyday life. I photograph them in different places, spaces and circumstances. Gradually, the project moves beyond my own personal history, becoming an observation of this ordinary yet universal object.

This project considers the pillow as something completely ordinary and at the same time deeply intimate: an object that exists across cultures around the world and accompanies us throughout our lives. Yet behind every pillow is a unique, individual story of the person who lays their head upon it.

The colour negative transforms the familiar reality of the body and bedroom into an altered, unstable space associated with sleep.

Traces of 21 Nights