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RACHEL WHITEREAD

The Turner Prize-winning Rachel Whiteread makes air solid. She takes empty interiors and gives them presence and heft. She gives the inside of things a life we never knew they possessed. Shakespeare said a poet "gives to airy nothingness/ A local habitation and a name". Ms Whiteread gives to airy nothingness a heap of pathos, weight and human significance.

Over the past thirty years, through redefining traditions of Minimal and Conceptual art, Rachel Whiteread has created an influential body of sculpture which explores the themes of absence and memory through the manipulation of architecture and space. Using industrial materials such as plaster, resin, and rubber, she often creates casts that reproduce the interior spaces of familiar objects, revealing unfamiliar negative spaces in which emptiness takes on a material presence and what was once invisible acquires a palpable shape. The molded shapes originate from everyday objects (a bed, a house, a box, a bathtub, interior space), yet the materials' presence, and sometimes transparency, can give these sculptures as much a ghostly dimension as a profound presence.

Her best-known works are probably Ghost (1990) and House (1993). For the former, she made a plaster cast of a room in an old house, revealing its back-to-front contours, its inside-out fireplace and doorknob, its details of wallpaper and wainscoting. In the latter, she took a whole Victorian terrace house – 193 Grove Road in Mile End, east London – and cast its interior in plaster. The result was a physical monster that played mind-games with the public who came to see it: it was both a massive sculpture and a 3-D void, a cosy home denatured into a brutal plaster cliff. It won the Turner Prize.

The plaster queen went on to triumph in other cities and other media – the resin Water Tower on a rooftop in New York, the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna – before returning to London to fill the vast Turbine Hall of Tate Modern with a cityscape of 14,000 white cardboard boxes. "Generous and brave," cooed The Guardian. "Meritless gigantism," sneered Brian Sewell in the Evening Standard.

Ghost, her breakthrough piece in 1990, wasn't achieved (as many people assume) by pouring liquid plaster down a chimney and letting it set. "It took three months, and was done by hand, by getting a bowl of plaster and flicking it on to the wall, gradually building it up. It's not solid, it's just a skin, a plaster-cast of the surface. It doesn't even have a ceiling." How did she present the idea to potential sponsors? "When I was trying to raise money to make it, I used to say I was 'mummifying the air inside the room'. I still think that's a good description."

House was more complex. "In House, we took a mould of the interior, cast it and then removed the house, brick by brick." It sat by the side of the road, an unprecedented expression of inside-out reality ("a strange and fantastical object," The Independent called it) until it was demolished by Tower Hamlets Borough Council on 11 January 1994.