Rachel Whiteread Part Two

As an artist, I'm often attempting to, or accidentally, convey or produce works imbued with a personal nostalgia, this is the segment of my practice that forms a kind of therapy- not because my childhood was terrible (it wasn't) or because I'm from a 'broken home' (it's a great contemporary term which, I personally think sucks) but because what we've done and experienced and all of the collective experiences of those closest to us, or those that were once closest to us, is what essentially defines our sense selves. It's what we're made up of.

And because I guess, I'm still at that very immature, selfish and inward thinking stage of trying to define the world through my own eyes.

Whiteread's House is the most absolute acknowledgment of this understanding. We fall in love, and contrastingly walk away, at seemingly, the drop of a hat. People that we once loved and laughed with, religiously wrote to, danced and cried amongst, people that we wholeheartedly believed that we lived for, are now either distant memories that we retrospectively gaze upon with either heartbreak or humour, or something thereabouts inbetween.

Through House Whiteread has managed to create what was proposed to be a permanent testament to those relationships, nostalgia in concrete form, as hard as a rock and as flexible as glass. Just imagine all of the things that you have experienced, triumphed over or been broken down by, being cast in concrete.

Here's to remembering.