Rachel Whiteread in Conversation with Ann Gallagher Tate 2017. A down to earth contemporary sculpture that has a no frills approach to using the everyday to cast a superb array of works. / by Mark Edwards

Sculpture, casting the every day life size and having the ability to look at an object from teaspoons, to the Holocaust museum in Vienna are trademarks that Rachel Whiteread poses in copious quantity. Originally making her name and winning the Turner prize in November 1993 for project Untitled ( House), Such an impressive interview with this down to earth lady, she talks in simple language and allows the viewer to capture the essence of her process in how she formulates her work. Whitereads practice she describes as a life long privilege to make a good living over the past thirty years doing what she loves. An ambitious hard worker not afraid to take on the challenges of being the first lady to overcome near impossible. Like the casting in resin of the rooftop Water tower in So Ho New York city 1998. During the day the sculpture has an aura of the cedar lining it was cast from and at night through its translucent material it is invisible. Her work challenges the everyday object a feat in itself to be talented to make objects take on a new life yet look like the real they were cast from. Many of these forms taking on the reverse thus like House giving an aura of the lived ephemeral quality and at the same time bringing new life to a derelict home, or like her cast mattress that has this bodily aura as it is kind of slumbering resting on a wall or the baby like talking water bottles, they are limbless headless yet it is like they are living talking back to you. Whiteread talks about her sculptures evolving firstly from drawings that she sees as works in themselves and like a lot of her smaller sculptures form a series of studies, that is then transformed to major works. My current mini-project mood bags is a series more than twenty brown paper bags that I have drawn and colored with pastel simple smiley faces some with text, to describe how i am feeling at a given moment of the day. Looking at these bags I can see this work evolving into cast bags of some sort, much like Whitereads casting in resin of the undersides of chairs Untitled (100 spaces) 1995