Rachel Whiteread, the Turner Prize-winning artist famous for casting the interior of a house, is made a dame in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Her 1993 sculpture was a life-sized concrete cast of a condemned terraced house in London’s East End, complete with imprints of fireplaces, windows and light switches.
The public sculpture was exhibited on the site of the original house, but after huge debate it was demolished.
Since then, her public commissions have included a Holocaust memorial in Vienna, her Fourth Plinth sculpture in Trafalgar Square – a cast of the plinth itself – and Water Tower in New York.
In 2017, the Essex-born artist had a major exhibition at Tate Britain.
Whiteread has criticised what she calls “plop art”, a glut of public sculpture around Britain which she says does not interact with local people.
She has said she feels “slightly exasperated” by questions about whether the likes of a shed can be called art.
“If you keep plugging away and make good enough work, people will hopefully see there’s some poetry in a shed,” she told the Press Association.
She is made a dame for services to art.
