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Rachel trained in painting in Brighton Polytechnic , was briefly at the Cyprus College of Art , and later studied sculpture at London's Slade School of Art. For a time she worked in Highgate Cemetery fixing lids back onto time-damaged coffins. She began to exhibit in 1987, with her first solo exhibition coming in 1988. She lives and works in a former synagogue in East London.
Many of Whiteread's works are casts of ordinary domestic objects and, in numerous cases, the space the objects do not inhabit (often termed the "negative space" — instead producing a solid cast of where the space within a container would be; particular parts of rooms, the area underneath furniture, for example. She says the casts carry "the residue of years and years of use".
In 1993, Whiteread was the first female artist to be awarded the Turner Prize. She has received many commissions, including the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, and her latest public sculpture is a clear resin cast of the empty plinth for the Fourth Plinth Project in Trafalgar Square.
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