Rachel Whiteread

Award winning YBA artist known for her sculptures which typically take the form of casts

exhibition installation view
Rachel Whiteread, Embankment, 2005. Installation view, Tate Modern, London, 2005. Photograph by Gautier Deblonde.

Rachel Whiteread joined Cape Farewell on the 2005 Art/Science Expedition, battling temperatures of -30°C to join the Noorderlicht locked in ice at Tempelfjorden, Svalbard just north of the 79th parallel.

Later that year, she created a gigantic labyrinth-like structure entitled EMBANKMENT in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Part of the celebrated Unilever Series of commissions the work was made from 14,000 casts of the inside of different boxes, stacked to occupy the monumental space. Gautier Deblonde’s photographs of EMBANKMENT toured globally with Cape Farewell’s Art & Climate Change exhibition.

Rachel Whiteread is an English artist known for her sculptures which typically take the form of casts. She was the first woman to win the annual Turner Prize in 1993. Whiteread was one of the Young British Artists who exhibited at the Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition in 1997. Among her most renowned works are House, a large concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian house; the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, resembling the shelves of a library with the pages turned outwards; and Untitled Monument, her resin sculpture for the empty fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square.

She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2006 and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to art.

Tate Modern – Embankment by Rachel Whiteread
About the 2005 Art/Science Expedition

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