Photos

Following up on my Tate Modern theme I want to show you my next shot which I took in late 2005 when the Tate opened to the public its 6th exhibition of the Uniliver series called embankment by the artist Rachel Whiteread. When this exhibition was on I did not have the intention of taking a picture of this particular art work but then one night I took the camera to work for a different reason and end up taking a single shot just for the memory, which now I’m glad I did, the same did not happen with the 3rd exhibition back in 2002 by Anish Kapoor called Marsyas which I failed to photograph.

Whiteread was born in London and raised in Essex, until aged seven, when the family returned to London, Rachel trained in painting in Brighton Polytechnic, was briefly at the Cyprus College of Art and later studied sculpture at London's Slade School of Art, she lives and works in a former synagogue in East London with long-term partner and fellow sculptor Marcus Taylor. They have two sons.

In spring 2004, she was offered the annual Unilever Series commission to produce a piece for Tate Modern's vast Turbine Hall, delaying acceptance for five to six months until she was confident she could conceive a work to fill the space, Throughout the latter half of September 2005 and mid-way into October her work Embankment was installed and was made public on October 10, it consisted of 14,000 translucent, white polyethylene boxes of which themselves were casts of the inside of real cardboard boxes, stacked in various ways some in very tall mountain-like peaks and others in lower piles in rectangular shapes. They were fixed in position with a liquid adhesive.

She cited the end scenes of both Raiders of the Lost Ark and Citizen Kane as visual precursors, she also spoke of the death of her mother and a period of upheaval which involved packing and moving comparable boxes, this exhibition was also inspired by a trip to the Arctic, although critics counter that white is merely the colour the polyethylene comes in, and it would have added significantly to the expense to dye them. The boxes were manufactured from casts of ten distinct cardboard boxes by a company that produces grit bins and traffic bollards, thank you all for your time and patience and above all for your support.