A pile of 14,000 white polythene boxes was today unveiled as the latest art installation to occupy the gigantic space of the Tate Modern gallery’s Turbine Hall.

The artist - Rachel Whiteread, 42, a former Turner Prize winner - says that she first got the idea while cleaning out her late mother's house, when she found a cardboard box which once contained her toys and later was filled with Christmas decorations. The smell and the shape brought back memories.

Later coming upon boxes squashed in the street or stacked in the back of a lorry, she was inspired to explore the "universal quality of the box", whose uses range from solar ovens to children’s playhouses. Packing up to move studio made her notice the variety of forms.

The piece, entitled Embankment, was also inspired by Whiteread's trip to the Arctic earlier this year. The semi-opaque boxes bear a resemblance to giant ice blocks or even - in a nod to the way that the Tate family made the fortune which endowed the gallery - to sugar cubes.

The work fills the back of the hall and the boxes have been stacked into giant forms up to 40ft high, resembling both a cityscape and landscape. Embankment is the sixth in the Unilever series at Tate Modern.

Visitors can walk between the enormous shapes, which also climb up the walls of the space and Whiteread has attempted to give the impression of a warehouse through the use of artificial lighting.

The work began with 10 boxes chosen for their individual character, from which Whiteread made plaster casts. These were then mass-produced, complete with their flaps, indentations, corrugations, imprints of wine bottles and bottle tops, by a manufacturer of bottles and plastic goods. They were brought to the gallery in five trucks and installed in the space over five weeks using a couple of cranes.

Whiteread’s commission follows that of the US artist Bruce Nauman, who surprised visitors by installing a cacophony of sounds, but nothing to see. But it is perhaps the eerie sun-like image The Weather Project, by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, which made the biggest impression. The public also fell in love with Marsyas, the giant, red trumpet-like sculpture by Anish Kapoor, the first British artist to fill the space.

Other works have included Double Bind by the late Spanish artist Juan Munoz, featuring groups of mysterious grey figures, and three steel towers entitled I Do, I Undo and I Redo by the French sculptor Louise Bourgeois.

Whiteread is known for creating casts from spaces underneath domestic objects such as chairs or hot water bottles. In 1993, she won the Turner Prize after creating House, the concrete cast of the interior of a condemned terrace house in London’s East End. The work prompted a debate in parliament.

Today the second British artist to work in the space said Embankment was the "culmination" of 15 years of work.

"It was intimidating when the space was empty. I certainly took a deep breath and tried not to have the image of it much in my head.

"Once I started installing the work in here, I was really quite amazed by the amount of people that use Tate Modern, that an art gallery can be so popular, which is wonderful. But if I had thought about that beforehand, I would have been extremely intimidated."

She said of the preparation work: "When you are making a maquette, you are a giant working with a small-scale object. Here you are an ant working in an extremely large place."

She said of her trip to the Arctic, where she went with a group of artists to try to draw attention to the melting icecaps: "It blended into the work. Going to the Arctic was a sublime experience and I wanted to bring a sense of that place into here."

The artist said she was extremely happy, continuing the environmental theme, that the work was only temporary and would eventually be recycled back into plastic products. She described the work as a piece for the winter "seen through the darkest days of London".

Tate Modern’s chief curator Sheena Wagstaff said: "Like other artists who we invite for this project, there is delight and then there is a silent period where she considered the enormity of the challenge and the gauntlet thrown at her. She countered that challenge admirably.

"Very few artists working internationally across the world today are able to take up the challenge. Rachel is one of the few. She has responded to the building in a different way to that of her predecessors."

Catherine Wood, curator of contemporary art at the gallery, said: "People have been thinking along the lines of the way Rachel has treated architectural spaces in the past so I think it’s going to be quite a surprise that she’s chosen something as humble and throwaway as a cardboard box.

"She began to think about the box as a container of memory and not just a memory but that the air contained in it has a certain smell which is incredibly vivid from the past.

"Boxes have a universal quality. The fact is that everybody has used a box to pack up their belongings or shopping ,or whatever. We’re really excited about presenting this to the public."

Whiteread’s largest work to date cost £400,000 from sponsorship money and, unlike previous works in the hall, it is meant to be seen from above as well as within.

The gallery and the London-born artist said that visitors should not try to clamber on to the blocks or move them around, as the work was a fixed piece and each block had been glued down.

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