Anya Gallaccio’s sculptures and installations encourage deep engagement with the natural world and its cycles of growth and decay. Since the 1990s, she has been using organic materials, including apples, flowers, trees, chocolate, wax, ice, and chalk, that undergo radical transformation during the lifetime of the work. There is an inherent alchemy in the way that these materials behave and react to each other, and the resulting lack of artistic control gives Gallaccio’s work its particular potency, sometimes pulsating with life, sometimes melting or degrading into nothingness.
Ina Cole: Many of your works are ephemeral and must be re-created whenever they’re shown. What does the process involve?
Anya Gallaccio: Most of the remade works are site-determined, so when the context changes, meaning
or experience also shifts. Expectations are different in private or non-commercial spaces as opposed to a pristine commercial gallery. I recently remade the chocolate room, Stroke, in an empty Victorian shop in Scotland, on Paisley’s high street. Scotland has a reputation for its sweet tooth, but there’s a lot of food poverty and unemployment in Paisley. . .
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