Claire Twomey: White Baroque

Claire Twomey combines a Baroque excess of domestic–therefore feminine–paraphernalia with a Minimalist palette that manages not to overwhelm in her immersive ceramic installations. The white palette is really interesting with the shadows that come into play. They are installations rather than sculptures because they not only interact with their environment but because they often involve the viewer as well.
A bit like Rachel Whiteread’s  signature plaster casts of the insides of ordinary domestic objects, like wardrobes, beds, floors and baths in 1988 that have been described as “minimalism with a heart”. This artist, also British, has done a number of cool things, including but not limited to:
  1. In London in 2006, Twomey created an intervention that wanted to  create an interaction between the Victoria & Albert Museum and the audience. The work, Trophy, filled the cast courts with 4000 Jasper Blue birds. The birds sitting amongst the classical sculptures created a three-dimensional landscape to walk within. 
  2. For Consciousness/conscience 3000 units of porcelain were produced to create a temporary floor at the Ceramic Biennial in Korea. The floor was crushed by the participation of the audience during the exhibition period. Crunch crunch. That kind of porcelain destruction seems absolutely delicious to me.

Watertower at MoMA

Can you spy the water tower? It’s in the top right.

The rooftops of NYC are filled with water towers, but this one is deceptive. It is not actually a water tower, but a commissioned piece Water Tower by British artist Rachel Whiteread. Cast in clear resin of the inside of a real water tower, it actually has no color of its own. A fact I didn’t realize when I was trying to take a picture of it and couldn’t quite get it.

Whitehead says:

So it’s a single clear plastic casting of a full–sized water tower that sat on the roof on the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street, on a dunnage.

I had originally thought of making this piece solid but that’s technically impossible. So we had to make it empty, so the whole thing is a skin of about four inches all the way around. And it has the texture of the inside of the water tower, so it’s really about solidifying water and trying to make this water look like it’s just frozen in a moment of time. It’s like the actual water tower has been stripped away and there’s this solid water left behind.

It’s translucence means that in different lights it shows up more or less visibly, like a sky ghost over Manhattan.

Rachel Whiteread. (British, born 1963). Water Tower. 1998. Translucent resin and painted steel, 12′ 2″ high x 9′ in diameter.