Rachel Whiteread

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2006

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the artist Rachel Whiteread.

She came to public prominence in 1993 with the life-size concrete cast of a Victorian house in East London. The sculpture prompted a public debate about what conceptual art is - the house was destroyed shortly afterwards. At the same time, Whiteread was named winner of the Turner Prize at the age of 30. She had studied sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art and became one of the generation of Young British Artists, with her work displayed alongside that of Damien Hirst. Her most controversial work - a memorial to 65,000 Austrian Jews who died in the Holocaust - was unveiled in Vienna in 2000 amid heightened political tension. Much of her work focuses on casting hidden spaces, with the inside of a box as the inspiration for the 14,000 boxes which form her latest exhibit, Embankment, on display at Tate Modern, London, until the end of April.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: The Köln Concert Part 1 by Keith Jarrett Book: A reference book on the natural history of the island Luxury: Ink, pen, paper and correction fluid

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2006, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an artist. Her most recent work can currently be seen on exhibition at the Tate Modern,
0:36.4	but not for much longer. When the exhibition finishes, the 14,000 white boxes that make up her creation will be demolished, granulated, and turned into
0:46.0	traffic bollards and grit boxes.
0:48.8	Much of her work disappears in similar fashion, including the famous Inside Out House that she created in East London, but other
0:55.0	pieces remain. Her water tower is still in place on top of the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
1:01.1	and her Holocaust memorial stands controversially in the Eudenplatz in Vienna.
1:06.2	She is perhaps Britain's most respected modern artist, admired for the way in which she explores
1:11.8	places in our lives so familiar that we hardly see
1:14.7	them anymore. She's been described as tough and rigorous, but she thinks of her
1:19.1	work as quiet, spiritual and precise. It always has an emotional beginning, she says. She is Rachel
1:26.8	White Reed. What then Rachel is the emotional beginning for 14,000 white boxes.
1:33.0	I'd gone back into the studio very sort of quietly and without assistance
1:38.0	and just wanted to try and make work in the way that I had 15 years ago when I first started which was just me and a bag of plaster really.
1:49.0	But why a box? Well I'd been I'd moved house I'd moved house, I'd moved studio, life had been in complete chaos.
1:57.0	And my mother had died and we had to clear her house and I was just surrounded, completely surrounded by boxes.
2:04.4	And full of junk sometimes and full of very precious things in other...
2:07.2	Exactly, in trying to work out what was junk and what wasn't was quite a difficult
2:11.0	thing to do as well. So I, you know, I literally, as I always do really,
2:15.0	is start from what's really happening in my own life.
2:19.0	And there was one box that was a sort of family box that was in my mother's house and it had at one point it had the Christmas decorations in it and then that was crossed out and it had my toys in it and that was crossed out and it had something else in
	...

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