Rachel Whiteread - British Sculptor and Installation Artist
Movements and Styles: Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Sculpture,
Born: 20 April, 1963, London, England
Seeing a great piece of art can take you from one place to another—it can enhance daily life, reflect our times and, in that sense, change the way you think and are. - Rachel Whiteread
Whiteread began as a painter, then evolved into casting small mundane domestic objects through to her now larger-scale castings of the interiors of stairs, mantles and fireplaces and an entire house.
Ghost (1990) was her first foray into large-scale sculpture made by filling a room of a Victorian house in North London with concrete and peeling away the exterior. It created a solid cast of the details of the interior space (walls, mantle, doors) creating a positive sculpture that reveals itself as coming from a lounge room.
From this Whiteread expanded on this method and created House (1993; destroyed 1994). Essentially, Whiteread cast an entire Victorian terrace house in London that was due to be demolished with other surrounding house's. The exterior was dismantled again leaving the positive sculpture of the interior of the house. It stood alone after all other homes have been demolished and became an emblem of the areas working-class homes that once spanned the street, sparked heated debates around issues of real estate, class divisions, and urban sprawl.
I am interested in further exploring elements in Whiteread's works:
* The space which surrounds and defines the objects/structures - representations of the objects they denote - Negative impressions of objects (tension between negative and positive)
* Memory of the object - it's like she frees them from their original object and leaves memory (new object) with a trace of the original
* Object and sites selection - they are all have a familiar, human resonance - objects that people can hold, use and inhabit (chairs, stairs, houses)
* Practices both within the gallery and in public space like Embankment (2005) in the Tate Modern, Turbine Hall
* Representation of memory
Ghost, 1990
House (1993; destroyed 1994)
Embankment, 2005, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London
Embankment' comprised of 14,000 casts of the inside of different boxes, stacked into a palace like configuration in the cavernous Turbine Hall. The work was said to invoke the sense of mystery surrounding ideas of what a sealed box might contain.
Whiteread had considered making a single giant monumental sculpture but then came up with is an anti-monument, a form collapsed back into a landscape.