Rachel Whiteread’s cast of the inside of a Victorian room at the British Broadcasting Company’s head quarters is all that remains of the original space. The room, used by George Orwell during the Second World War and thought to have inspired room 101 in his book Nineteen Eighty- four, was dismantled around the plaster and fibreglass used by Whiteread to cast the space. As the exhibition information says, Whiteread’s sculptures are always on a human scale and the true impact of the size of this piece is lost in images. While looking at an image the piece could be mistaken for overlarge or even daunting but standing in front of the sculpture, the scale feels surprisingly comfortable. It has a human feel and is remarkably easy to take in in the few seconds it takes to walk around it. Similarly, while photographs convey the rough shape, straight walls and protruding windows, only by walking around the object can you see the tiny shadows thrown up by dents in the walls, the skirting board gaps and the negatives of the window handles or their rust stains. For a piece in which the human feeling it is designed to have comes from a comprehensible scale and familiar imperfections, a two dimensional image robs Untitled (Room 101) (2003) of its purpose in the viewer’s experience.

Author of Exhibition Information unnamed (2017) Rachel Whiteread Tate, Exhibition Curated by Anne Gallagher and Linsey young.

 Photograph: © Tate