Rachel Whiteread-‘Like Making Air Solid’
Having the preference of viewing the artwork first before reading the description, when I first saw the 25 blocks, the textures looked like large gummy candies or like ‘headless” chess pieces. After reading the description, it dawned upon me that these are like “solid air” under the chairs we are sitting on. Making things out of the negative spaces we usually conveniently forget, or neglect is actually quite fascinating. The idea of making absences seem present really got me interested in her works.
- What got her interested in casting?
Her parents played a huge role in paving her interests in arts. “During her childhood in London, Whiteread’s parents’ interests in art and architecture made an enormous impact on her understanding of form and material. Her father’s fascination with urban architecture and her mother’s artistic practice allowed her to see the intersection of home and studio, life and art. Whiteread fondly remembers helping her father lay a concrete floor in their basement to convert it into a studio. The processes of looking, emptying, and filling run throughout her work, revealing how the surfaces of daily life can disappear and reappear, bearing the traces of their previous lives.”
In an interview at Tate, Whiteread mentioned that her eureka moment came when she was in the second year of college, doing a foundry course when she placed a spoon into some sand and poured molten metal over it. It became a spoon without its spoon-ness. The curve inside the spoon was lost and that was when she began to delve more into casting.
- How did she create her artworks?
She would draw them out first before letting her works take the form of casts, which are formed when a liquid material is poured into a mould and allowed to solidify. Using materials like concrete and resin, her sculptures take the shape of everyday objects.
For instance, the drawing she had for Twenty-Five Spaces.
- Impact and meaning of her artworks:
She felt it was very similar to the times where she experienced a lot of people sleeping on the streets, like the cardboard city in Waterloo, making her feel that many things are like lost human beings. The sense of loss is what pushed her to make more. Taking on the essence of humanity, she explored more into everyday objects like hot water bottles, mattresses, beddings, baths or things that you will find in a domestic home.
She kept going back to hot water bottles because she felt that it was a good material to test her casting materials with. She also tried using rubber gloves but hot water bottles looked more like headless, limbless torsos, having a nurturing element to them. She also made certain creases to make them look like a ribcage. For instance, the Untitled Pink Torso shown below.
- Thoughts on her artworks-“Minimalism With A Heart”:
Whiteread focuses on what is not there, making the invisible-visible by capturing negative spaces around us. By doing so, she frees her subject matter of practical use, devoid of utility. These familiar architectural forms allow the viewer to simply look and consider the meaning behind the sculptures.
She evokes strong emotions in her viewers by keeping the history of the object in her work. I feel that her works are like breathing life into the stillness, leaving a new permanence-memories. This is because the objects she casts – mattresses, beds, sinks, chairs – all have an intimate, physical relationship to the body despite their stark appearance. As objects that are meant to be held, used, and inhabited, their reference point is always human. And because they are always second-hand, they have had a life prior to the artist’s treatment of them, and thus bring their own histories to her work.
References:
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/rachel-whiteread-2319/five-things-know-rachel-whiteread
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/rachel-whiteread-2319/rachel-whiteread-conversation
https://gagosian.com/artists/rachel-whiteread/
https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Drawing-for-Untitled–Twenty-Five-Spaces/0869FA07AE19D51B
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/sep/12/rachel-whiteread-tate-review