YouSaid · the spoken record

Rachel Whiteread

lines on the record: 51
first: 2006-02-26
most recent: 2006-02-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Because that's how I draw. I like to, you know, I draw a line and then maybe get rid of a line. And also with writing, you can just, you know, I can compose songs and write stories and then get rid of them as well. Rachel White, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's been very difficult to choose and I think in the end I'm going to go for ink pen paper and correction fluid. I know that sounds like a lot of things but actually it's just for doing drawings. Why do you want to do it?”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think mainly because it was really the music that I first sort of found myself with, I think Yeah, it's completely sort of overwhelming.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Johnny Cash singing Would you lay with me in a field of stone and this is really for Marcus my other half and soulmate who I've been with for 19 years now.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe I do want to stay a little bit out there, yeah. But then I have, as you said, just accepted a CPE, so that's very much in there, isn't it?”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Um well you know to do something like that or to take on something like that if you're going to do it properly you need to spend an awful lot of time doing it you know I'm a trustee to a museum I do all sorts of things but you know you can't do everything otherwise you spend all your time doing those things and not actually doing”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, I think there's something in my kind of family history, you know, that I don't know what it is. I'm not, as I said before, I'm not a great team player. And I suppose something to do with the establishment, you know, that's a big team, isn't it, in a way. And of course I'm part of the establishment. I'm a very well-known contemporary British artist. But I think with that comes a certain degree of responsibility. Maybe I'm enjoying having a family life and being a different kind of person for a little bit.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I, you know, I love the fact that my works in museums all over the world and in private collections all over the world. That's fantastic. I think there's something about sculpture that stands in the street that I find very difficult, mainly because I don't like most of it. And it has to have a good reason for being there.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So this is for my son, who actually likes to be known as Oliver Dodger. He loves music, and I think one of the joys of having children is that they introduce you to other art forms that you never thought you'd appreciate. And he loves the musical Oliver, amongst others. So this is for him”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and he came in a lot when I was installing it and we played with walkie-talkies and, you know, it was great fun. Since having him, I found that there's a certain sort of joy in becoming a parent. I think maybe one becomes less selfish and you just think about the bigger picture a bit more.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, yeah, he loves it actually, and he says, oh, I know I mustn't touch that because it's sharp. But he plays with, I've got a whole collection of dolls houses in my studio, so he loves playing with those. And yeah, he comes and helps, as he calls it.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's I wouldn't say that was to do with my mother dying, I'd say it was to do with becoming a parent actually. You know, one of the greatest joys in the world.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a beautiful piece of music that my parents had played at their wedding and we recently played at my mother's funeral.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't actually been back. Now, I will go back. I think it's worked very well. I know people use it as a memorial, should be. And I'm proud”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I personally felt that I don't know if it was in my head, I don't think so. And during the unveiling there were snipers on all the rooftops and I had to watch all the Secret Service police standing around whispering into their microphones and with guns everywhere pointed sort of in our direction. It was just terrifying actually. I walked away and collapsed.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will not assassinate me necessarily, but I just felt very physically thrilled. It was a very intimidating situation to be in. There was a lot of sort of unrest politically and I was part of that.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You There was a lot of resentment I know towards me and I know towards the work. I don't think I really mattered it was more towards the work”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the Jews are also known of the people of the book. So I think it's, you know, I never like to sort of. Say too much about work once it's been made, but people seem to be very, very happy with it now”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's sort of a negative imprint. It's as if it's a room taken from one of the surrounding buildings and it's the cost of a library, so thousands and thousands of books attached to the outside of it all cast in concrete. You can't see what the books are because the spines are faced inwards and it has an inscriptions on the outside of it and two blank doors that you can't open. It's a bit like a bunker, which is something that I had intended.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had never realised quite how complicated it was in Austria. And I think throughout the five years that we worked on it, I think there was like three or four different sort of politicians in charge of it. It was always just the ground was always shifting. Nothing stayed still. It was just this very, very complicated, politically complicated and emotional thing, which you know, I don't want to go into it too much. It was very, very, very difficult thing to do. I'm now very proud to have made it.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I did take the turner price and then I was blackmailed with the other prize. They said that they were going to turn up with £40,000 to take and they were going to burn it on the steps of the Tate. And, you know, I didn't have any money really at the time. And I thought, what an outrageous thing to do. So I took the money and then spent six months giving it away. gave a large donation to shelter and then the rest of it we gave in grants to young artists. Number five is Nick Cave in the Bad Seas with Kylie Minogue singing Where the Wild Roses Grow. This is another piece of music that I listen to in the studio. I listen to Nick Cave an awful lot and I think it's a bit of sort of contemporary opera really. Very beautiful piece.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was quite difficult. I think first off she was very proud and then she was maybe a little bit sort of jealous. But essentially though she was really proud of me. If I'd been painting or if I'd been doing sort of slide tapes or doing work with computers, it was much more in the sort of language that she was using. It would have been harder. But because I made all this sort of big sculpture and she was quite frail, I think that was a good distance for it. I said, oh, I couldn't lift that bucket of plaster. Oh, how do you do it?”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually the underside of the mattress, you know, it's the space underneath a bed, actually. But it looks like a rib cage. It looks like, you know, all sorts of things. There's something about mattresses that I think are very sort of human.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The peace, shallow breath I made very soon after my father died, you know, within a couple of weeks actually, and people have written about it saying it was a bed I was born on or it was a bed that he died in. And no, it's none of those things, but it's really to do with his memory.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Keith Jarrett's the clone concert, and actually this piece of music, I think it's the first sort of piece of music that really had sort of found myself at this point and I listened to this at Brighton a lot, you know, and I've listened to it ever since great piece of music.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there was a woman called Barbara Carlyle who came to see my show at the Slade. And it was a very odd show, but she liked it and offered me an exhibition. And I think because I had that focus, actually, that's really why I was able to make closet.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who's sort of comforting? Yeah, I could just remember it and the smell of the clothes and the blackness and the sort of furry blackness of the space. And I wanted to somehow make that real, and I made a piece called Closet actually about a year after I left college, which was exactly that, and it was the cast of the inside of a wardrobe which was then covered in black felt. And I remember making it and putting it up in the studio, and really having it kind of eureka moment and being very elated that actually I'd made something that you could walk around. And it wasn't really about that that's what sculpture has to be, but I'd spent about 15 years trying to do that. And it was an accomplishment. Absolutely.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't know at that point because I didn't really know that it was sculpture I was trying to make but I think when I left college I wanted to make something that was really trying to make a childhood experience concrete which was casting the inside of a wardrobe and I'd thought about having been a child and sitting inside wardrobe and it was something I like to do. People think that's a bit strange but I actually know lots of people that did it.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had no idea where I was going actually, and I think when I was at the Slade, the first year I was there I nearly left actually, and my father had been very ill, and I was really in a bit of a kind of muddle, and I hadn't made a sculpture at that point.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The very first cast I made was a spoon, and I simply got a spoon and I pressed it into the sand and got the indentation of the spoon and then filled it with lead or aluminium, I can't remember, and picked it out and it lost the spoonness of the spoon, so the indentation had disappeared and I just realised that doing something as simple as that could change your perception of an object. And 22 years later I'm sort of still doing the same thing one way or another.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What did you do all over the place I couldn't sort of work out what an edge was about, actually, and I was attaching things to it and bringing them down to the floor. And then actually my real kind of love was going beach combing and getting all these, what I used to call found lines, which were just all these bits of old metal and tyres and bits and bobs and stuff, and took them all back to the studio and made Papiam Mache and made these kind of three-dimensional drawings that you sort of walked through. But towards the end of that I'd done a casting course when I was there, and it was really at that point, I think, that it was the first cast that I made, and I begun to sort of find a language, I think.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number three, this is the Jackson 5 and the records ABC. And this was, well, Michael Jackson was actually my first love when I was, I think, probably about eight years old. And my entire bedroom was plastered in pictures of him. And he was a kind of cute thing in those days.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think when I was at school it was the last thing on my mind actually I tried sort of everything else and it wasn't until the sixth form that I actually went into the art rooms and I did my sort of O and A level art in a year I think and then went on to foundation and realised that that's what I did absolutely”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He started out as a geography teacher, then he became a humanities lecturer, became head of the humanities department at North East London Polytechnic, and then eventually became head of the art school there through his sort of love for art and also, you know, he was a very good administrator and it was at the time when polytechnics were changing.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, she didn't. She taught and did sort of other bits and pieces, but no, she never, I don't think she ever really made any money. She was an art team.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She was, yeah, maybe not quite as early as that, but certainly in the sort of seventies, yeah, she was an artist that was working away with little sort of recognition and worked on an exhibition that was very sort of well known called Women's Images of Men with four other feminists and they were all in the basement of our house in Muswell Hill selecting this exhibition and that was my first sort of real experience of really kind of looking at art and I'd go into this sort of smoky room and sit at the back and watch them all arguing.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just remember my mum in her sort of purple hot pants dancing around to this and being sort of quite boho and thinking it was interesting.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew it was political, but it wasn't something that I was going to sort of stand on a soapbox and shout about, but in the end everybody else did, so that was fine. This is by Pentangle and it's called Light Flight, which is actually the music from a television series called Take Three Girls, which was completely my sort of parents' generation. And I have two sisters and we were the sort of three girls.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think mainly because it was about sort of all our lives from builders who were sort of quite intrigued by how it was made to Granny who lived in a house like that who now lives in a tower block.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in the end it was about six months because I think the day that it was finished was the day it was supposed to be torn down so we then had to rent the sites.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was post left, there was milk, newspapers. Eventually, towards the end of its life, people just used it as a kind of notice book.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a very emotional thing to make, and then I think it was because it almost got sort of taken away from me and everyone else sort of took ownership of it.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the thing about it was that it was incredibly sort of monolithic and from the front it looked like this almost this thing that had landed and then people realized that actually that was this kind of house that they lived in or their parents lived in and I think there was a there was a real sort of humbleness about it. I mean it's difficult for me to talk about because I work so hard on it and then there was this incredible sort of media sort of foray about it and then I had to go there in disguise to look at it and I was just a mess at the end of it actually.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was sound simple, it wasn't quite as simple as that. I worked with an engineer and we essentially built a building within a building and then took away the bricks.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I sort of sit as the piece that taxi drivers like to talk about, and that's always a very good sort of thermometer, I think, on how, you know, what contemporary art is.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is We Float by PJ Harvey and I think I'm extremely lucky and have the sort of best job in the world that if I didn't have my job I'd quite like hers because I think she's kind of amazing and it's music that I listen to in the studio all the time and she kind of keeps me company.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it was, you know, I think. When you're asked to make something in the turbine haul, it's the most ridiculous space, you know, the most ridiculous art space there is really. It's classified as a street. It's enormous, absolutely enormous, and completely daunting. And I wanted to make an experience that was a sort of family experience as well. And when you go there, it's amazing how kids just absolutely love it. Play hide and seek”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So it must have been pretty robust, and I still have it. I never actually cast it, and it stands now in my studio. And it just when I opened it, opened this box, it had the smell of my history and my childhood and my parents and my sisters. And I was incredibly kind of moved by it and wanted to somehow make that an experience for everybody.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, in trying to work out what was junk and what wasn't was quite a difficult thing to do as well. So I literally, as I always do really, is start from what's really happening in my own life. And there was one box that was a sort of family box that was in my mother's house. And it had, at one point, it had the Christmas decorations in it, and then that was crossed out, and it had my toys in it, and that was crossed out and it had something else in it.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd been I'd moved house, I'd move studio, life had been in complete chaos, and my mother had died and we had to clear her house and I was just surrounded completely surrounded by boxes and full of jewels.”
2006-02-26 · Desert Island Discs · Rachel Whiteread · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source