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Lot Essay
Rachel Whiteread's inside-out casts of everyday objects form a quiet and powerful body of work that fixes in form the echoes and residue of past human existence and experience. From her major works like 'Ghost' and 'House' to her casts of smaller vessels such as bathtubs, sinks and mattresses, her work is primarily concerned with the castings with which the human body is surrounded during its lifetime.
Of these, none are more poignant or haunting than the beds and the mattresses, for they are the plinths on which our most important and profound experience take place. They are the sites of our conception, our birth, our dreaming and our death, of our most isolated and fragile moments as well as our most generous and intimate ones. Found on skips or discarded on wasteground, these forgotten documents of life are used by Whiteread to speak of the actualities of living while at the same time conveying the ugliness of decay and the inevitability of death.
This untitled work from 1991 is cast in plaster. For Whiteread, plaster is not merely a traditional sculptural medium but more importantly another type of casting that is often used to house the fragile body. From the plaster-casts that are made to aid the recovery of broken limbs to its use for death masks, plaster has traditionally been used to fix and record in concrete form the more mutable transience of flesh. The imprints that are left on its surface, Whitread shows us, speak volumes about the nature of our own fragility and impermanence.
Of these, none are more poignant or haunting than the beds and the mattresses, for they are the plinths on which our most important and profound experience take place. They are the sites of our conception, our birth, our dreaming and our death, of our most isolated and fragile moments as well as our most generous and intimate ones. Found on skips or discarded on wasteground, these forgotten documents of life are used by Whiteread to speak of the actualities of living while at the same time conveying the ugliness of decay and the inevitability of death.
This untitled work from 1991 is cast in plaster. For Whiteread, plaster is not merely a traditional sculptural medium but more importantly another type of casting that is often used to house the fragile body. From the plaster-casts that are made to aid the recovery of broken limbs to its use for death masks, plaster has traditionally been used to fix and record in concrete form the more mutable transience of flesh. The imprints that are left on its surface, Whitread shows us, speak volumes about the nature of our own fragility and impermanence.