Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Contemporary Art

Abstract

This dissertation examines the sculptural practice of Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963) through the lens of liminality, the uncanny, and the archive. By casting the negative spaces of everyday objects, domestic interiors, and monumental architecture, Whiteread materializes absence and transforms overlooked objects and spaces into solid, lasting forms. Her work destabilizes binary categories such as presence and absence, private and public, representation and abstraction, and permanence and ephemerality, exposing memory as fragile, discontinuous and often ghostly. Drawing on theoretical frameworks rooted in psychoanalysis, photography, time and space, this study explores Whiteread’s practice as a form of sculptural archivization.

Analysis is structured throughout thematic chapters. First, “Ghosts of the Everyday: Objects as Human" considers Whiteread’s modest cast of domestic objects as affective archives, rooting their resonance in universal human experience. Second, “Reading the Room: Architecture as Absence" examines larger architectural casts, situating them within debates on memory, phenomenology, and spatial politics. Third “Nonuments: Monuments as Archives” analyzes public and site-specifc works as counter-monuments that challenge the permanence and authority of traditional memorials and historical narratives. Across these case studies, Whiteread’s work emerges as archive, producing forms that record intimacy and loss while destabilizing how history is remembered and represented.

This dissertation contends that Whiteread’s sculptures are not static memorials but liminal, active sites where presence and absence converge. They compel viewers to confront memory not as a stable preservation of the past, but as dynamic, evolving encounters with the present.

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