Anya Gallaccio: ‘Rather than control a material, I’m trying to have a conversation with it’
Ahead of an exhibition at Turner Contemporary, artist Anya Gallaccio talks about her relationship with ordinary, ephemeral materials.
A version of this article first appeared in the autumn 2024 issue of Art Quarterly, the membership magazine of Art Fund.
Who is Anya Gallaccio?
Anya Gallaccio was born in Paisley in 1963 and studied at Kingston Polytechnic and Goldsmiths College, London. She creates site-specific, sculptural installations, often using ephemeral, organic materials, that, due to their temporal nature, decay, dissolve and break down, rarely remaining as permanent objects. A new survey show, spanning three decades and including new commissions, opens at Turner Contemporary in Margate in September.
The context of my work is always important, so by putting these works from the past 30 years together in Margate, it makes it much more about Kent and agriculture, industry and commerce in the south of England. The exhibition title, ‘preserve’, is really about taking care of the things that are under our noses, and not taking them for granted. My emphasis on materials and process questions what is thought of as beautiful.
One of the things I’ve been doing is working with chalk, which Kent is known for, of course, with its white cliffs and quarrying. I’m mixing chalk and clay that will be used in a rebuilt version of a machine – a kind of 3D printer – first developed for the work Beautiful Minds (2015-17) [in which it extruded wet clay over a series of weeks to create a mountainous form]. I’ve been talking to people about Lidar scanning, a form of laser scanning used in architectural modelling, which I want to use to scan the structure of a denehole – a hand-dug pit made to extract chalk. I am mapping a denehole near Faversham. It’s literally outside someone’s front doorstep, under a manhole cover in a tiny front garden, in the form of a 30-foot [9-metre] shaft that fans out into four caves; it’s extraordinary, like being in a cathedral. The idea is to build a positive from that negative space, in the gallery.
The processes in my work – the breaking down and building up – involve ordinary materials such as apples, clay, candles, flowers. ‘preserve ‘Beauty’’ (1991-2003) uses red gerbera flowers, which are mass produced. They are organised in a grid behind glass; the grid breaks down as the flowers decay and the geometry changes. It was fantastic to have it up for a long time at Tate Britain [as part of last year’s rehang], to show how the flowers became petrified behind the glass, and how it became sculptural again.
The lack of control over these processes is really important. I try to let the thing be itself, as, ultimately, the materials are going to do what they want to do. That approach was initially informed by a simplistic notion of gender and feminism. A lot of art history has been about having mastery over a material, with the most successful and famous people in the canon all being men. So, I wanted to challenge that, and rather than controlling a material, I’m trying to have more of a relationship or conversation with it.
Working that way with materials is something I’ve done a lot, like the curtain of threaded apples that rot over time in the work ‘Falling from grace’ (2000). I’m really obsessed with apples and have been doing extensive research on them. The apple is a symbol of nature, but at the same time we know it’s a product of grafting, which requires human intervention. It’s full of those kinds of contradictions. It’s seen as a very British fruit but was introduced here by the Romans. And, of course, it’s associated with forbidden fruit and sex and breaking the rules, but it’s also connected to being wholesome and innocent – something you give to your teacher as a child.
The education programme that accompanies the exhibition is called An Apple a Day and will involve schoolchildren visiting the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale Farm in Kent to learn about apple growing. It’s inspired by experiencing Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard Project in Berkeley, California, in the early 2000s [a project that was set up to connect students through food and nature]. The thing that excited me about that was how you can use cooking and gardening as a tool for teaching so many different things: history, science, maths. Since then, I’ve wanted to design and plant an orchard, which is what we’re doing at the Lees Court Estate near Faversham. The orchard will be a resource for schools and an outdoor classroom. In my mind, the orchard is a sculpture.
In all my work there’s a kind of balance between how much control I have or the farmer has or the machine has. Nobody has ultimate authority and, in a lot of ways, I don’t really mind what the outcome is. For me, that’s exciting.
Anya Gallaccio: preserve, Turner Contemporary, Margate, 28 September to 26 January 2025. Free to all, 10% off in shop with National Art Pass.
The more you see, the more we do.
The National Art Pass lets you enjoy free entry to hundreds of museums, galleries and historic places across the UK, while raising money to support them.