theEYE: Rachel Whiteread

2005

26min

Rachel Whiteread has created some of the most remarkable and resonant public sculptures of recent years. House (now demolished) cast in concrete the interior of a terraced house in London's East End. Holocaust Memorial is a moving memorial in Vienna to the victims of the holocaust in Austria. Yet she also frequently works on a domestic scale, casting in plaster and resin the spaces inside, around and beneath furniture, floors and staircases. Her art is a uniquely poetic response to the everyday, and to the haunting themes of memory and mortality. In this video profile Rachel Whiteread speaks about the ideas that prompted a number of her best-known sculptures, including Ghost, her first cast of the space inside a complete room, and Monument, which established a shimmering presence in London's Trafalgar Square during the summer of 2001