Rachel Whiteread 

"Ghost recreates the living room at 486 Archway Road, each panel revealing the shape of the walls, fireplace, widow, door, skirting and cornice. But everything appears in reverse, inside-out, the deep skirting now a recessed frieze, the grid of tiles around the bulging fireplace indented. Whiteread realized, as she looked at the reversed light switch, that she had become the wall, looking into the space that had once been inside the room and was now solidified. She had succeeded in her aim of mummifying the air in the room, of entombing the social space in which lives were once lived out. Visual reminders of those lives remained – the soot in the fireplace, the chips in the skirting board, the fragments of paint that had been absorbed into the plaster as it dried. But life itself was absent. The work is a spectral negative, an after-image of a room that no longer exists, a record that had been bleached of colour like an old photograph left out in the light. In a sense cathartic, Ghost is a mausoleum to Whiteread’s own past, yet it speaks of a shared sense of loss, of memories bricked in and entombed." (Mullins and Whiteread, 2017)