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Rachel Whiteread

Embankment
“In the past few years my work has become more formal. Ghost came from a very specific place, whereas the piece I made for Documenta last year was not cast directly from a particular place, but from the underside of secondhand floorboards. It was a more generalised, formal piece. Plaster is my most frequently used material, but I have experimented with rubber, mainly out of a need for flexibility.”

Neri Oxman

Neri Oxman: Material Ecology

Vespers

“Vespers is a collection of 15 3-D-printed masks that explore the idea of designing with live biological materials. The collection consists of three distinct series, each reinterpreting the concept of the death mask—traditionally a wax or plaster impression of a corpse’s face. Taken as a whole, the three series form a narrative arc from death to rebirth. In the first series, Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group looked at the death mask as a cultural artifact. Fabricated using an algorithm that deconstructed polyhedral meshes into subdivided surfaces, the masks were 3-D printed with photopolymers, as well as with bismuth, silver, and gold, and rendered in color combinations that recur in religious practices around the world.” Rachel Morón