Rachel Whiteread

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/rachel-whiteread-2319/rachel-whiteread-conversation

• ‘I use objects like sketchbooks’
• Changing things through very simple acts
• Collections of objects – found objects, objects of interest
• ‘everything is made inside out’ – can’t tell how it’s going until the ‘skin is peeled off’ (e.g. the house)
• ***cast something inside a solid block – playing off this idea of trust in the artist, also creating a void – exhibit a full mold? Giving a platform and therefore importance to something that may otherwise be discarded*** (could exhibit in a pair – inverses of each other in a way? – two halves of a whole)
• Using objects from everyday – life and language
• ‘materials I had an affiliation with’ – ‘lost human beings’, ‘the presence of gloom and sorrow’
• Using the materials that are usually ‘work in progress materials’ (plaster, rubber, wax as opposed to bronze) *consider this in relation to my own work – why plaster/concrete? Ideas of permanence?*
• Several recurring ‘typologies’ (beds, mattresses, baths, hot water bottles etc – furniture and fittings, domestic, ‘funerial’, ‘sarcophagi’)
• Embedded in history but also contemporary
• Ghost – first move up in scale, life-size – could be inside – a certain awareness of space and presence – you can stand where the wall was, walk through walls
• House – can be seen as an artist who can work in the ‘public realm’, in the ‘open air’
• Went on to cast floors after Berlin residency (?) – link to Cornelia Parker here – also staircase link?
• Working in series, returning back to things etc
• Importance of drawings alongside sculptural practice
• Hot water bottles as torsos, also have a ‘nurtured’ element, anthropomorphic
• 100 spaces – first time in multiples, ‘seriality’ – making a clear link to minimalism – changes with the light, it can have different associations day to day
• A very human absence
• Pushing materials to limits – largest ever cast resin
• ‘an encapsulated memory’
• Polypropelene – (for turbine hall piece) – eco-friendly, could be shredded afterwards and turned into street furniture
• After vastness and whiteness of turbine hall, moved back to working alone and in colour e.g. toilet rolls, plaster/resin + pigment – making lots and selecting some to make little sculptural vignettes, continually playing around with it, iterative until she finds a result she likes
• Making rules for yourself but then also allowing yourself to change those rules
• Doors everywhere, always photographing them, the variation, their reasons for being etc
• Shy (?) sculptures – just about them existing, no one has to see them – also about a journey of getting there
• **Papier mache as a material – out of shredded papers etc, excess material, a 3d collage even?, cumulative
• ‘mummify’ or ‘fossilise’ the air in a room
• Interesting way of answering questions – very blunt and to the point, often yes/no

• Adding/building up layers – ‘like casting a drawing’ – link to vija Celmins who sees her drawings almost as objects
• Furniture and importance of her location in london – link to family history, her class
• ‘preserve the everyday, give authority to more forgotten things…stopping it in time and casting it in something solid’

• Park around the house acts as a plinth almost – can view/see from all around
• ‘making a building within a building’ – the preparation that has to go in to prepping the house – digging new foundations, removing structural interruptions such as cupboards/sinks etc
• ‘you live and breathe within the skin of the house, gnawing at the surface’
• Choosing the colour of concrete (white cliffs of dover?) – added a pigment, then sprayed on a 5cm deep layer onto the outside of the house, then fill this shell
• The footage shows an incredible sense of the walls closing in, making you increasingly aware of the physical space of the house – the walls closing in have a kind of duality with almost an organic growth of the walls?
• Exciting process of concealment and reveal
• The graffiti etc it gained while in existence – a continuation of this kind of document of human presence? Or disruptive?
• The house wasn’t solid concrete (are any of her sculptures solid? I had presumed they were but perhaps they aren’t – does this matter? Is this purely a logistical choice?)