Into the Goodwood

At the magical Goodwood Art Foundation, a pineapple perches on a chalk bank, 16th-century music bathes an ancient copse and Rachel Whiteread’s cast of the underside of stairs climbs Escher-like into the sky. Charlotte Mullins goes exploring

- Charlotte Mullins

JUST south of a cherry glade, close to a woodland path, lies a small grassy area surrounded by tall deciduous trees. Despite the leafy canopy, the sun illuminates the clearing and acts as a spotlight for Untitled (Pair), a 1999 sculpture by one of Britain's leading artists, Rachel Whiteread. Two white tomb-like shapes lie on the grass. They are the cast spaces from underneath mortuary slabs, each the length of a body, and in this contemplative setting they appear as a memorial to personal loss, as well as conveying the passing of time, like medieval tombs in a country church. Untitled (Pair) is part of the inaugural exhibition dedicated to Dame Rachel at the new Goodwood Art Foundation, near Chichester, West Sussex, which opened its doors on May 31.

Dame Rachel is best known for House, her 1993 cast of an entire terraced home in the East End of London. Since graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1987, she has been casting the interiors of objects found in the family home—hot-water bottles, wardrobes, baths, the undersides of chairs. In 1991, she made Ghost, a fragile plaster cast of the walls of an entire front room: by appearing to solidify the space, it had the feeling of a mausoleum, a tomb to past lives, with the traces of those who had spent time there left as sooty imprints in the reversed fireplace. Her work is uncanny, for things that were once recesses, such as fireplaces, now bulge out, whereas light switches appear as recesses. In 1993, she was the first woman artist to win the Turner Prize and she went on to cast libraries, staircases, windows and cabins, as well as exploring the progression of time on derelict sheds, such as Doppelgänger (2020-21), one of two sculptures she will exhibit inside the Goodwood Art Foundation’s gallery this summer, together with a selection of rarely seen photographs.