Rachel Whiteread treats space as the substance of sculpture, a physical entity that, in the words of French writer Georges Perec, “arrests the gaze.” For over 30 years, Whiteread has attempted to fill the spatial voids bounded by objects and architecture and capture them in form, grounding her practice in a singular paradox—to make the invisible physical. Her materials, including plaster, concrete, resin, and rubber, speak of solidity, yet what they embody is entirely ephemeral: lived space, complete with the accumulated time, emotions, and memories of places and things that once interacted with bodies.
If in the minds of others, sculpture is an object intended to occupy space, for Whiteread, it has metamorphosed into something else entirely. By means of casting, her work inhales space within defined parameters to create often heavyweight works that come back to burden the environs from which they were taken. Whether sealing the air beneath a bed or within a room or entire house, her sculptures—from the cast mattress of Shallow Breath (1988) and the anthropomorphized hot water bottle of Torso (1988) to the architectural negative casts of Ghost (1990), House (1993–94), and the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial (2000)—have always doubled as commemorations. Even her ongoing series of “Shy Sculptures,” which preserve the interiors of unremarkable sheds, shacks, and wooden houses, take on a memorial role, transforming the forgotten and unseen into quiet meditations on slow disappearance and the afterlife of the ordinary.
Rajesh Punj: Your recent exhibition at the newly expanded Goodwood Art Foundation featured indoor as well as outdoor works. Two key sculptures—Detached II (2012) and Untitled (Pair)(1999)—along with the recent Down and Up (2024–25) were set into the landscape, subject to seasonal elements. How did this show come about, and how does it fit into your approach and wider practice?
Rachel Whiteread: The work at Goodwood was put together in response to the landscape. What’s interesting when you’re involved in working on a project like this, which took three years to come to fruition, was coming here when there were just overgrown fields and nothing else, when everything was still to be built. It became a passion project. . .
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