SECTION HOUSE

Section House - The Cloud Collective, 2010.

The Cloud Collective's Section House, located on a public green strip in Oisterwijk is just that: a physical, dense section through a typical house. It seems to exist halfway between building site and ruin, halfway between house and playground, halfway between real and unreal.

Ghost - Rachel Whiteread.

It recalls Whiteread's Ghost- though what is given material presence is not negative space, but the cut of the section. We feel, in it, the resistance of lost matter meeting matter. The drawing is firmly in control of the material - the projected slice is given weight beyond itself.

 Catherine Ingraham , in an essay titled Losing It in Architecture has called the architectural drawing a lament. Here, indeed, we see the architect's marks stand in for his absent object, calling it into presence. At the same time, the structure breaks no rules, rather, the logic is misapplied, drawn out from itself. The delight is in what the conventional can allow when we engage with it critically.

The Section House acts as an operator, what Stan Allen might call a 'transaction' between the abstract realm of geometry and the material stuff of building. 

POSTCARDS OF AMBIGUITY

In this 'Postcard' series, Whiteread uses a hole punch to cut out negative spaces in the rooms, capturing the three-dimensional concerns of her sculptural form in a two-dimensional manner. The well-known touristic images are obscured by the cluster of circular abscesses, and they become ambiguous.  More of Rachel Whitereads' drawings at the Tate Britain courtesy of the Guardian here, with accompanying article here. 

Alongside the postcards are a collection of pseudo-technical drawings, including the revealing 'Study for "House"'. In this work, Whiteread uses an everyday and meaning-laden medium - correction fluid, or 'twink' - to simultaneously create and erase. The house is 'corrected' into a 'pure' whiteness, it becomes absent, yet at the same time, we are more aware of the space the object occupies after the 'intervention'. White is at once pure and ghostly, the house in the images becomes both nothing and, oddly, sky. 

Study for "House", 1992

SECTION HOUSE

The Cloud Collective's Section House, located on a public green strip in Oisterwijk is just that: a physical, dense section through a typical house. It seems to exist halfway between building site and ruin, halfway between house and playground, halfway between real and unreal. It recalls Whiteread's Ghost - though what is given material presence is not negative space, but the cut of the section. We feel, in it, the resistance of lost matter meeting matter. The drawing is firmly in control of the material - the projected slice is given weight beyond itself. 

Catherine Ingraham , in an essay titled Losing It in Architecture has called the architectural drawing a lament. Here, indeed, we see the architect's marks stand in for his absent object, calling it into presence. At the same time, the structure breaks no rules, rather, the logic is misapplied, drawn out from itself. The delight is in what the conventional can allow when we engage with it critically. The Section House acts as an operator, what Stan Allen might call a 'transaction' between the abstract realm of geometry and the material stuff of building. 

Whiteread, Ghost