NARRATOR: The artist, Rachel Whiteread, on creating this room-sized sculpture.
RACHEL WHITEREAD: What I wanted to do was to make an impression of a room that was potentially full of books, but also read as a kind of very simple, minimal, textured surface. What I did was make a series of bookshelves, which I then packed with books, then made a polystyrene interior, sort of mold of the inside of that, and then filled it with plaster.
What you're seeing is a negative space of where the books were. So, if you're looking at your bookcase at home and you think about the space behind the books-- that's what's left. That's what I've actually cast. There's a mixture of new books and second-hand books, some very well thumbed books, some library books. And there' s an awful lot of color in there, it's very subtle color, but there's a lot of color, so it's really about trying to work with the surface.
What I really like about the piece is it's very hard to make your eye settle on one point where you just look at something and, "ooh, I like that bit best, or I like that bit." It just really is a matter of your eye wandering around. There's no one area that you stare at, you're just kind of taken around it.