From her formative years at the Slade to acclaimed public commissions worldwide, Rachel Whiteread has shaped contemporary art, using sculpture to confront difficult social and political questions.
Dame Rachel Whiteread is one of Britain’s most renowned artists, becoming the first woman to win a Turner Prize in 1993 for her temporary sculpture House, an iconic public monument exploring memory, loss and communities destroyed by urban redevelopment.
Born and raised in North London, she studied Painting at Brighton Polytechnic before moving on to the Postgraduate Sculpture programme at the UCL Slade School of Fine Art in 1985. These were formative times. It was here that Rachel met her now husband and found lifelong friends in what she describes as an “intensely bonding experience”.
Rachel credits her time at the Slade for giving her much more than technical training:
An art school education teaches you at a very young age to think for yourself, to be intellectually curious, to be bored and how to work yourself out of a hole. It gives you tools for life.
Since then, she has had a long and seminal career. Her acclaimed public commissions have made the invisible visible and her drawings and sculptures have featured in collections across the world, including in the Tate, National Galleries of Scotland, Centre Pompidou, and Museum of Modern Art.
There are many things she is proud of, from the making of House to “being extremely fortunate to have made a career out of doing what I love”. However, it is her Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna that sticks with her most – a “stubborn reminder of fascism and how catastrophic it is no matter who the victims are”.
In 2018, Rachel made a specially commissioned sculpture, Untitled (Slade Pinboard), for the new UCL Student Centre. It still hangs in the atrium, a response to a bustling site where thousands of staff and students meet every day, and a reminder of her UCL roots.
Reflecting on her journey, Rachel offers some sound advice:
You should always be ambitious for your work and not yourself. And remember it is wonderfully creative to be bored and, above all, art is good for the soul.
