| Concept: The sculptor Rachel
Whiteread endows space with a tangible physicality of its own.
Her established practice is to make objects from the spaces around
or within familiar domestic items: chairs, mattresses, entire
rooms, cast directly in plaster, rubber, resin or concrete. They
originate in childhood experiences of claustrophobia and concealment,
but have come to suggest absence and loss, the traces of objects
in the spaces they leave behind. In 1993 she made a concrete
cast of an entire house interior in the East End of London; when
the house was demolished as part of an urban clearance programme,
the cast within it remained as kind of memorial to the lost building.
Her suite of screenprints documents the continuation of East
End house demolition. The image of a mausoleum under construction
in the London Portfolio focuses upon spaces yet to be filled,
the potential of each individual cell to testify to presence
and absence, memory, recollection and expectation. |
