Embankment by Rachel Whiteread

Embankment by Rachel Whiteread
In a sense, Rachel Whiteread's sculpture Embankment began with an old, worn cardboard box.

She found it in her mother's house shortly after she died.

Whiteread was going through her mother's belongings when she came upon a box she remembered well.

It had had many lives: it used to reside in her toy cupboard next to piles of board games, and at one point was filled with Christmas decorations.

Over time its sides started to collapse, the printed logo on the outside faded, and the lid came to shine with the traces of all the Sellotape used to bind it up over the years.

Old containers of different kinds have often been the inspiration for Whiteread's art.

In 1993, she created a life-size cast of the interior of a condemned terraced house in London's East End, a work that led to her winning the Turner Prize.

In 2000, she completed the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna's Judenplatz, featuring the cast of an entire library, with all the details of shelves and imprints of books.

And in 2001, she crowned the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square with a translucent inversion of the plinth form itself.

Each time, Whiteread has been drawn to spaces marked by signs of human life, be they ideas, monuments or bodies.

Although the inspiration for Embankment came from the single box she found in her mother's house, Whiteread