Richard Noble discusses the paradoxical concept absence. It is often connected to emptiness or lack of something, someone or an event we would usually expect in an area. Noble notes that ‘emptiness is a relative condition.’ 1 They are dependent on our expectations. It is a space rather than a void, capable of having a physical presense. Absence is comprehended through the containment of physical mass. ‘Emptiness depends on it’s opposite, the absence it signifies can only be comprehended through the physcial presence of boundaries that define it.’ 2
Empty space is cast and given a physical presence in Rachel Whiteread's works. She inverts spaces, capturing foresnsic residual traces present on quotidian objects and spaces. Whiteread's sculptures challenge notions around relational embodiment, representation and the index through the transformation of empty spaces into physical forms.
Richard Noble, The Meaning of What Remains. In: Eckhard Schneider, ed. Rachel Whiteread: Doors Floors and Stairs. (Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2005) 66
Ibid