Tate unveils 14,000-box sculpture

Embankment is the sixth work in the Unilever series Enlarge Image

A mammoth installation comprising 14,000 white polyethylene boxes has gone on display at Tate Modern gallery.

Turner Prize-winning sculptor Rachel Whiteread says her work, entitled Embankment, explores the "universal quality of the box".

Whiteread was inspired by a cardboard box she used to house her toys, found while clearing her late mother's house.

She is the sixth artist to fill the London gallery's Turbine Hall, which is 500ft long and 115ft high.

After discovering the box, Whiteread, 42, says she came upon boxes squashed in the street, stacked in the back of a lorry or used more inventively in the likes of children's playhouses.

Whiteread said filling the Turbine Hall had been "an enormous challenge".

Concrete casts

"The space is like no other - gargantuan and enveloping," she said.

"I hope to challenge the space by developing a degree of intimacy, which somehow relates to all our lives."

The second British artist to fill the hall, Whiteread is known for creating casts from the space in, underneath or between domestic objects and interiors.

She won the Turner Prize after creating House, the concrete cast of the interior of a condemned house in London's East End.

She created Monument for the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2001 by installing an inverted cast of the plinth on top of the granite slab.

Rachel Whiteread won the Turner Prize in 1993

Her winning design for the Holocaust memorial in Vienna saw her put the cast of a library, including the imprint of books, in the centre of a square.

The Unilever series has seen a mixture of installations placed in the Turbine Hall, which runs the length of Tate Modern.

The last artist to fill the hall before Whiteread was US artist Bruce Nauman, who created a piece with a cacophony of sounds but nothing to see.

Others included French sculptor Louise Bourgeois' I Do, I Undo and I Redo, which consisted of three steel towers, and Marsyas - the giant red trumpet sculpture by Anish Kapoor.

Embankment was kept under wraps for five weeks while it was being installed.