kiss the mist

The everyday, the ordinary, the habitual, are significant and Architecture can enable and make beautiful the everyday practices of human exchange. Consider the work of sculptor Rachel Whiteread. Her work makes the intimate seem monumental yet it still manages to retain its intimacy. Whitereads work ‘House’ was a concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian terraced house. Her work uses a ‘reversal, confrontation of positive and negative, dissolution, transference between public and private, inversion and mirror imaging’. ‘House’ is cast inside an object that held traces of peoples lives. This cast illustrated the residue of the habitual and appeared as a ghostlike portrayal of an ordinary object. This negative sculpture is a spirit image of common existence. Whiteread brings a significance to discarded items of domesticity. Daman Hyldreth, sculptor, sees, ‘…a reversal of an enclosing, comforting, dwelling, a place of repose and comfort, a symbol of domestic hopes and dreams. What was left was a monument to one’s most private moments but with the privacy stripped bare and petrified. “House” monumentalized the past in a subversive manner, instead of allowing for a connection to and retrieval of the past, “House” subverted the warm cozy memories of home.’