LONDON (The Associated Press)—
British artist Rachel
Whiteread has drawn inspiration from a worn-out cardboard box, the
movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and a trip to the Arctic to create a
vast labyrinth of empty space.
Whiteread's installation, Embankment,
unveiled Monday at the Tate Modern, is the latest exhibition to fill
the gallery's Turbine Hall. The huge room — 500 feet long and 115 feet
high — dominates the gallery, which was converted from an old power
station.
Whiteread's largest work to date is created from
14,000 white polyethylene boxes stacked into towers that dwarf the
visitors who wind around them. From above, the work resembles a
landscape made of sugar cubes or blocks of ice.
To make the
boxes, Whiteread filled 10 different cardboard boxes with plaster, let
it harden and peeled away the cardboard. She had thousands of replicas
of the boxes industrially produced in a translucent white polyethylene
material.
Whiteread installed the boxes in the Turbine Hall over five weeks, not knowing exactly how it would turn out.
"You're
an ant working in an extremely large space," she said Monday at a news
conference. The sensation was much different from making a miniature
model of the work in her studio, where she felt like a giant playing
with blocks, she said.
Whiteread said the piece is "a
culmination of 15 years of my thoughts." As she sorted through boxes in
her late mother's house, she came upon one that had been a storage
container for her toys and, later, Christmas decorations. The box and
the air inside it brought back a flood of memories, explained Catherine
Wood, Tate's curator of modern art. The inverted casts of boxes
representing the empty space inside them and the title Embankment, suggest barriers holding back floods of emptiness.
Whiteread
was also inspired by the final scene in the 1981 film "Raiders of the
Lost Ark," the first in the Indiana Jones series. The shot at the end
of the movie of a large warehouse with endless stacks of cardboard
boxes is a clear influence in Whiteread's work, which is illuminated by
cold, warehouse-style lighting.
A recent trip to the Arctic to
witness melting ice caps also inspired the work, Whiteread said. "It's
a winter piece, seen through the coldest days in London."
Embankment runs until April 2. When it closes, the boxes will be ground down and recycled, Whiteread said.
Whiteread,
42, has been making everyday objects into art since her earliest
exhibitions of mattresses and bathtubs in the late 1980s. She won
Britain's most prestigious art prize, the Turner Prize, in 1993 for House,
a concrete cast of a condemned house in London's East End. Five years
ago she filled an empty plinth in Trafalgar Square with a translucent
upturned cast of itself.
Since Tate Modern opened in 2000, the
Turbine Hall displays have become as much of a draw as the gallery's
permanent collection of contemporary. Previous exhibits have included
Anish Kapoor's Marsyas, a sensuous, blood-red snakelike sculpture, and Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project, an artificial sun that filled the space with eerie yellow light.
By Jenn Wiant, Associated Press Writer; Copyright 2005 AP
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