The Container of Memories

The Container of Memories

What is immortal? It has been a subject of fascination to humanity since at least the beginning of known history. Immortal is not likely happen in a physical form. However, if one creates memories for other, she lives in others’ hearts. That is eternity. Rachel Whiteread is an artist who captures memory and creates containers of memories by casting the negative spaces of furnitures and spaces.

Rachel Whiteread is a British artist who is best known for her sculptures, which typically take the form of casts. She is also the first woman to win the Turner Prize.Rachel Whiteread acknowledges that she was influenced by the language, scale, and “freshness” of American Minimalism of the mid-twentieth century, particularly in the primacy it attached to simple materials, the lack of visible gesture, and the importance of space. As she recalls, “Minimalism was definitely and influence, as it gave me the confidence to place something in the middle of the floor and let it be what it was.” In her work, such as cast-resin water towers, and plaster casts of the space around buildings, bookshelves, and the negative space created under chairs and tables, she has devised a new idiom of form, and forced an innovative way of viewing the world.

Like Artschwager, Whiteread considers furniture and its forms and connotations as the starting point for much of her artwork of the last decade and a half. As she acknowledges, she uses “furniture as a metaphor for human beings.” In 1988, for her first gallery exhibition. Whiteread bought three pieces of used furniture - a dressing table, a wardrobe, and a bed - and filled them with wet plaster, removing the wood when it had set. What remained were the spaces in between and around the furniture. As the artist noted. “The first table I made...was to do with exchanging once’s personal spcae with that of that table, the physicality of how you...