Anya Gallaccio Biography

Among Gallaccio's performances and installations, the most renowned is her chocolate room, Stroke (2014) at Edinburgh's Jupiter Artland. With walls created from nearly 90 pounds of chocolate, the interactive installation was lightly scented and beckoned visitors to interact by picking, licking, stroking or biting its surface, suggesting themes of anticipation and lust. As with most of her installations, the smell was at first inviting and enjoyable, but over time became increasingly unpleasant and overpowering. Another example of this is preserve 'beauty' (1991–2003), an installation comprised of bright red flowers arranged within four adjacent rectangular glass panels. Positioned neatly with stalks facing downward, the work recalls both traditionally feminine hobbies such as flower pressing or arranging, and still life and landscape painting genres. However, the ephemeral installation changes drastically throughout its period of display, beyond the control of the artist, gallery or audience. Soon enough the flowers wither, die and rot, decomposing onto the floor below, thereby reverting the romantic connotations of red flowers typically gifted from man to woman. This is experienced not only visually, but also through smell.

Alongside love and decay, other themes inherent to Gallaccio's work include the role of mass production, disposable commodities and consumerism, particularly in relation to waste normally hidden from view. Viewers of her work are consumers and therefore complicit in its waste and decay cycle. Her surrounding environments also heavily influence her practice; when in 2008 she moved from London to San Diego, Gallaccio started incorporating materials such as limestone and granite from the West Coast into her works, as with I still can't remember when or how I lost my way (2014). Though these open cubes are seemingly perfect, mechanised constructions of geometry, blending into their surroundings, each slab of stone is unique in colour and pattern and contains a geological history of its own.

An instrumental and key player of the generation of Young British Artists, Gallaccio was included in the legendary 1988 exhibition, Freeze, curated by Damien Hirst at the London Docklands. She trained at Kingston Polytechnic College and Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2003 she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, and her work has appeared in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2015); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2011); Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2007); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2007); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2004); Tate Britain, London (2003); Serpentine Gallery, London (2000); and Hayward Gallery, London (1997); to name a select few. Presently, Gallaccio splits her time between London and San Diego, where she is a professor at the University of California San Diego.

Jessica Douglas | Ocula | 2018