Friends,
For years, Rachel Whiteread has been making concrete casts of the interiors of apartments, rooms, and other dwellings. Think of pouring jello into a bowl and then removing the bowl: that's how her sculptures work. They give positive form to negative space, and they’ve even stirred up controversy like in House, a 1993 apartment sculpture that became a lightening rod for the politics of affordable housing.
They don’t look like traditional sculpture you could walk around, like a Greek god or the bust of a Roman leader. Her sculptures feel more like doorless rooms we can’t enter, windows we can’t look past. That can feel intimidating in its simplicity, but like Whiteread's sculpture above Wall (Apex), the meaning of the artwork expands with the more we learn about her process and materials.
So what are we looking at? It's a cast of a shed wall, most likely attached to her studio. It reminds me of a drawing of a home we might make as children. And then the word “apex,” a word that means “highest point,” which could refer to the ridge of the roof that helps stabilize the whole house. But there's something more poetic here, something hidden in her process and materials. After decades of pouring concrete, Whiteread returned to a child-like creative process we all know: papier-mâché.
It turns out the artist made the sculpture by gathering old papers from her studio and pressing it against the shed wall to dry. Gallery texts, invites, receipts, random notes and drawing scraps—it's all there inside Wall (Apex). That’s literally what this home is made of: her own history of making it, the stuff of her life. The paper scraps were pulverized, mixed, and pressed into the shape so that the sculpture’s representation and material are the same thing: home. There’s intimacy here, the sculpture is made from the stuff of life—breath and dust. Looking at its ridges, we can see the passage of time, pressed into shape.
Now it might be tempting to say this artwork is “valuable” and hanging in a gallery because the materials come from a famous artist’s studio floor, but I think that misunderstands the wisdom in this sculpture. We’re all surrounded by stuff like this. Think of a trip trinket on the bookshelf, a yellowed letter in the closet, that tattered handmade quilt, a kid’s doodle on the fridge. These things are invaluable to us not because of how perfect they look or how costly the materials because of the human touch and the memories they hold. Gathered together, they’re personal landmarks pointing us back to our lives.
I was thinking about these themes in Whiteread’s sculpture because I started feeling so ungrounded the past few weeks. Each day, I was working on a laptop, zooming with co-workers, and sifting through hundreds of tabs. And then, when I needed a break, I was listening to podcasts and scrolling on my phone and watching shows and researching for Still Life….All good things, but I could feel myself literally losing touch. I was getting headaches and eye aches, and my mind was often so full it was hard to sleep. I felt like I was living in a hall of mirrors. But looking at this plainspoken sculpture and returning to these poems, I’m reminded of where my life actually is: in this room, filled with breath and dust I gather together to write to you.
Take care,
Michael
“You Reading This, Be Ready” by William Stafford Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts? When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life– What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around? * * * * * * “Dusting” by Marilyn Nelson Thank you for these tiny particles of ocean salt, pearl-necklace viruses, winged protozoans: for the infinite, intricate shapes of submicroscopic living things. For algae spores and fungus spores, bonded by vital mutual genetic cooperation, spreading their inseparable lives from equator to pole. My hand, my arm, make sweeping circles. Dust climbs the ladder of light. For this infernal, endless chore, for these eternal seeds of rain: Thank you. For dust. * * * * * * “To Hold” by Li Young Lee So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet, we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight, measuring by eye as it falls into alignment between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky, she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me. One day we’ll lie down and not get up. One day, all we guard will be surrendered. Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize what we love, and what it takes to tend what isn’t for our having. So often, fear has led me to abandon what I know I must relinquish in time. But for the moment, I’ll listen to her dream, and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling more and more detail into the light of a joint and fragile keeping.
Here’s an exhibition on artists working with dust, ash, and dirt
These Nepali women transform trash left at Mt. Everest into artworks
This artist turns weapons into musical instruments
Melting guns and bullet casings, this artist turns weapons into bells
These poems help me, too!