Cradle was first exhibited at Luhring Augustine, New York, in March 1999, as the centrepiece of Antoni's installation "Imbed." The sculpture begins with a found object: a used, twelve-foot construction tractor bucket, rusted and worn from industrial use, which Antoni cut in half. One half was preserved as the mother form. The other was melted down and recast into eight successive scoops, each diminishing in size, nested inside one another within the original bucket: an agricultural loader, an excavator bucket, a snow shovel, a garden shovel, a fireplace shovel, a serving spoon, a soup spoon, a baby spoon. In Antoni's words, she created something that is holding itself. The procession from industrial scale to domestic intimacy, from excavation to nourishment, enacts the central preoccupation of her practice: the relationship between the body and the tools it uses to engage the world, between what contains and what is contained. The work weighs approximately two tons and is presented as found, the original bucket's rust and industrial patina intact against the matte black of the interior casts.