At Goodwood, Rachel Whiteread Is Redefining Sculpture Parks

Yahoo

a day ago

Rachel Whiteread is used to her work provoking strong reactions. The 62-year-old artist won the Turner Prize in 1993 for her landmark sculpture,'House', a plaster cast of the inside of a Victorian terraced house in east London. Less than four months later, despite a public campaign to save it, it was torn down by Tower Hamlets Council. In 1996, her plans for a Holocaust memorial in Judenplatz, Vienna — a room constructed from casts of shelves lined with books, their spines turned inwards — created a political furore. On that one, sense prevailed, and it still stands.
This summer, Whiteread, who was made a dame in 2019, will be the inaugural artist to have a solo show at Goodwood Art Foundation, a new sculpture park and gallery on the grounds of the Goodwood Estate in Sussex. Already, she has met with some local opposition. 'You make a decision about where something's going, and then suddenly a badger's moved in, or there's a squirrel in the way,' she says, sitting in her airy studio in Camden, north London, close to where she lives with her husband, the artist Marcus Taylor, with whom she has two sons.
'So there's been a bit of that going on,' she continues, 'but, having an enormous respect for nature, that's quite all right.' For an artist who's often associated with urban settings, Whiteread, who has clouds of soft curls and a friendly but no-nonsense manner, does have an unexpected interest in the bucolic. She was born in Ilford and went to school in London, then Brighton University and the Slade, but growing up she and her sisters were 'dragged all over the country' by her artist mother and geographer father.
The idea of interacting with natural landscapes is 'definitely in me from my family', she says, and over the years she has produced a number of what she calls 'shy sculptures' — tucked-away installations that you might journey to, or happen upon: a cast of a boathouse on a Norwegian fjord; another of a wooden house in Kunisaki, Japan; the concrete ghost of a cabin on Governors Island in New York.
At Goodwood Art Foundation, within grounds recently spruced up by garden designer extraordinaire Dan Pearson, she'll be exhibiting existing pieces including 'Detached II (2012)", a cast of a garden shed, and "Untitled (Pair) (1999)', twin tomb-like sculptures based on mortuary slabs, alongside a new work, 'Down and Up (2024-2025)', cast from the staircase of the former synagogue in which she and Taylor and the boys used to live in London's East End. 'When I made 'House', one of the things that really frustrated me was that I didn't really cast the staircase,' she says. 'I had to cut it away and cast around it, so the wooden part of the staircase was always left. It's hard to cast a staircase generally, because people are using it, but when we moved to Shoreditch there were two or three staircases in the building, so I cast them.'
In the Goodwood Art Foundation's new indoor space, the Pavilion Gallery, she'll be showing photographs, too; she's always taken pictures, using them as a kind of sketchbook, but has shown them in public only rarely. Grouped in threes, they capture haphazard, quasi-sculptural compositions that have caught her eye: a flattened traffic cone; an unusual storm drain; a ring of oxidation on a tiled floor. They're intriguing, and often quietly absurd. Whiteread pulls out a photograph of a black rubbish bag that she spotted recently, strung up on the iron railings of a London townhouse.
There's a small rip at the bottom, through which is visible a pair of perfect eggs. 'And there was not a single crack in them!' she says, delighted. When we meet, she's still a few weeks from installing the new show — which, as you might imagine, involves some serious haulage vehicles and some very big boxes — but the plan for it is very much in place: 'We're in the end game,' she says. Whiteread has, in the two-and-a-half year run-up, been able to enjoy some of Goodwood's other offerings, including its annual motoring event, Goodwood Festival of Speed, which, she says, was, 'very noisy, very smelly, but it was definitely interesting to sit in the VIP enclosure where the cars do those — whatever they do — weird turns in front of you. And the boys got to sit in these vintage F1 cars. It was good fun.'
She says she has been warmly welcomed by Goodwood's owner, the Duke of Richmond ('very, very nice, and so is his wife, and actually the Duke's a very good photographer'), though rural idylls are not, apparently, Whiteread's spiritual home. She has a place in Wales that she's soon going to visit and 'de-mouse', but eventually the city always calls her back. 'I love the countryside, but after a while I'm banging my head against a tree — I need some grot!'
Other cities are summoning her, too: in the next couple of years she'll have a show in Brussels, and will be installing pieces in Switzerland and Japan. 'I've been fairly consistent,' she says of her working life. 'I'm really very lucky to be able to do what I like doing.' Her oeuvre now involves photography, cast sculptures and also sculptures that are not cast: one of the indoor works at Goodwood Art Foundation will be a constructed piece, 'Doppelganger (2020-2021)', that has been built to look like a white shed being ripped apart. 'The older I've got, the more vocabulary I've got to use, so I'm just playing with that.'
Whiteread's work, whatever form it takes, deals with memory, residue, decay and the inexorable passing of time. And it speaks to us. 'People get very moved by things I've made,' she says, matter-of-factly. It's a phenomenon that she finds rewarding.
'If it helps shape people's lives, or helps people deal with something, or think about something, that's a gift I can give. I'm not trying to trigger people, but I know that the work is personal and has a sensitivity to it, and generally these things move people, don't they?'
The badgers, however, are staying put.
Rachel Whiteread is at Goodwood Art Foundation, Chichester, from 31 May to 2 November; goodwoodartfoundation.org
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