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B. CLAPTON PARK ESTATE, MANDEVILLE STREET, LONDON E5

© Rachel Whiteread

B. CLAPTON PARK ESTATE, MANDEVILLE STREET, LONDON E5 1996

Rachel Whiteread (1963 – )

Details

Dimension
745 x 490 MM
Media
DUOTONE SCREENPRINT
Accession number
P6539

Summary

The sculptor Rachel Whiteread endows space with a tangible physicality of its own. Her established practice is to make objects from the space around or within familiar domestic items: chairs, mattresses, entire rooms, cast directly in plaster, rubber, resin or concrete. They originate in childhood experience of claustrophobia and concealment, but have come to suggest absence and loss, the traces of objects in the spaces they leave behind. In1993 she made a concrete cast of an entire house interior in the East End of London; when the house was demolished as part of an urban clearance programme, the cast within it remained as a kind of memorial to the lost building. Her suite of screenprints documents the continuation of East End housing demolition.

The images show the demolition of three tower blocks of public housing flats in the East End of London and originated from the artist’s own 35 mm colour slides. The slides were stripped of colour to be screenprinted in grainy black and white as if they were reportage works from a war front.

Demolishedwas published in 1996 by Charles Booth-Clibborn under his imprint The Paragon Press and printed by Coriander Studio, London in an edition of 35.

Further reading:
Contemporary Art in Print, Booth Clibborn Editions, London 2001. Texts by Jeremy Lewison and Patrick Elliott, foreword by Charles Booth-Clibborn

 

Glossary

  • Cast

    To form material such as molten metal, liquid plaster or liquid plastic into a three-dimensional shape, by pouring into a mould. Also see Lost-wax casting.

  • Edition

    All copies of a book, print, portfolio, sculpture, etc., issued or produced at one time or from a single set of type. Printed works can be made in an edition of between one and many thousands of copies. With most printing techniques the plate or screen will become worn if very many prints are made, so to maintain quality (and exclusivity) editions of original prints are usually kept below one hundred copies and normally average between thirty and fifty copies. Prints made up of several different plates can be extremely complicated and time-consuming to edition, so in these cases editions are kept low for practical reasons. Sculptural editions are a set of cast sculptures taken from the same mould or master. These editions are usually much lower, consisting of no more than six casts. Though each cast in an edition might have a lower value than a unique piece, it may be a more effective way of offsetting costs of an expensive process such as bronze casting.

  • Imprint

    In a bibliographic item, the name of the publisher, distributor, or manufacturer, and the place and date of publication.

Portfolio