"Rachel Whiteread — ‘A home for old YBAs? There’d be great art and big egos’" by Kirsty Lang

I’m walking through woodland on a clear spring day and as the trees give way to a wildflower meadow, a staircase rises from the earth into a bright blue sky. Next to it is another identical set of stairs, inverted and heading downwards to form a V-shape with its companion. The sculpture is intentionally disorientating like an Escher print in which the normal laws of gravity do not apply. It is one of several works by Rachel Whiteread in the grounds of Goodwood House on the Sussex Downs, installed as part of a new sculpture park that opens at the end of this month.

Like much of Whiteread’s work, the staircase exudes a ghostly presence. It was cast from the space underneath the stairs in her former family home, a converted synagogue in London’s East End. Now it stands in the manicured landscape round one of England’s most renowned stately homes, but it carries the memory of another time and place.

The next day I visit the artist in her bright, airy studio on the edge of a canal in Camden Town. It’s remarkably tidy with long tables, shelves of art books and boxes of materials like a well-stocked school art room. Whiteread’s work might be bold and controversial, but she exudes a shy reticence not shared by most of her contemporaries in the Nineties Britart movement who shocked and entertained in equal measure. “We were full of bravado even if we didn’t feel confident inside,” Whiteread, 62, says. “There was a postpunk attitude of being very present and in your face.” These days her mop of wild red hair has turned white, and she’s a Dame of the British Empire, but she still considers much of her work to be political with a small p. “I’m interested in humanity, but I don’t bang a drum.”

Read full article at thetimes.com