Rachel Whiteread

The Great Women Artists

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most pioneering artists alive today, Rachel Whiteread. Working across sculpture and drawing, in mediums ranging from concrete to resin, and in scales that go from miniscule to colossal – from casting domestic hot water bottles to entire immersive libraries – Whiteread is hailed for her poetic, stoic works that draw so intimately on our human experiences. Discussing how her work gives, in her words “authority to forgotten things” Whiteread’s sculptures of the past three decades have not only made me rethink sculpture as a form and medium, but they have provided incredible commentary on the changes that have occurred – from the rapidly gentrifying London, the state of political change in 1990s and 2000s Britain, as well as imparting on us a reflection of impermanence and loss. As someone born in the 90s, I grew up with Whiteread’s work. Her sculptures were some of the first I ever saw and knew of as a kid and no matter what age we are, one can’t help but be utterly stunned and fascinated by them. Famous for casting familiar objects and settings, from houses to the underneath of a chair, baths to doors, Whiteread takes elements we use in our everyday life, transforms them into ghostly replicas, and ultimately makes us rethink their purpose, practical use, and the memory that these objects once held. Raised in London to an artist mother and geography teacher father, who encouraged her to scavenge found objects and “look up” wherever she went, Whiteread studied at Brighton Polytechnic and sculpture, with the late and great Phyllida Barlow, at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1980s. Her first solo exhibition in 1988, included her first series of cast objects, and in the early 1990s she made headlines with her sculpture House, a monumental, to-scale concrete cast of the inside of a three-storey townhouse. She has since taken over the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, London’s Fourth Plinth, created an extraordinary Holocaust Memorial in Vienna that resembles the shelves of a library with the pages turned outwards, has had major exhibitions and retrospectives all over the world and is still continuing to push forth all boundaries of sculpture in the most exciting and impactful ways. THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.instagram.com/famm.mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 ENJOY!!! Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/