ABOVE: Detail from Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment (2005), which was unveiled this weekend as the new Turbine Hall installation at the Tate Modern.

The Tate Modern opened its new public exhibit of Rachel Whiteread’s Unilever commission—Embankment, 14,000 stacked polyethylene casts of some battered cardboard boxes she found while clearing out her (deceased) mother’s house. A lot of Whiteread’s work has concentrated on plaster or aluminum casts of negative spaces—electrical switches, the space under tables, whole rooms—but she has never worked on such a scale before.

The Guardian says thumbs up, and that the ambitious work more than lives up to both the hugeness of the venue and the popularity of its predecessors. The boxes, which have been stacked in drifts and valleys throughout Turbine Hall, are slightly translucent because of their plastic construction; instead of being solid like Whiteread’s other works, these are negative casts of the cardboard boxes she selected, but still hollow. Embankment is on display to the public for free until April 2, 2006. Little boxes, made of polyethylene—it’s not quite ticky-tacky, but we’ll take it.

LINK: The Guardian > A view of a mind at work