Second Blooming, Anya Gallaccio at Turner Contemporary, Margate, by Hannah Lees
I visited the Anya Gallaccio exhibition Preserve a week after it opened. I was in Eastbourne, further around the south coast for the opening weekend but my husband and 4-year-old had visited before me. I took my 4-year-old with me when I visited, he was my tour guide. He ran past the bronze tree with porcelain apples, standing as an illusion of life, straight into the first room to show me the artwork preserve ‘Beauty’ (1991/2024), it’s red blood-like gerberas already starting to mould and drop from their glass coffins. I have never liked gerberas. I find them too fake-looking, garish and tacky. Jupiter, my tour guide son once chose them for me from the supermarket, they were fleshy-coloured peach, like the skin of a doll and I didn’t want to impart my snobbishness to his choice and so reluctantly accepted them. They sat on the dining room table and lasted much longer than they should have, like they had had botox and fillers injected in their fleshy petals to continue the artificial façade. The red gerberas in Preserve were thankfully already rotting and the white mould forming seemed like a second blooming of a more refined, elegant flowering, the initial signs of the coming end and beginning of the new.
Anya Gallaccio, preserve ‘Beauty’, 1991, 2024, © Jo Underhill 2024
I found myself reflecting on Gallaccio’s work and when I had first seen it. In 2003 on TV, her Turner Prize nomination, Matthew Collings striding through a room with bronze trees and apples festooned to the branches like a seasonal display rather than an attempt at reality. Artifice. I was 18 and had just started my art foundation course. And then again a few years later, 2005 Delfina studios, London: working for an artist as work-experience while on my BA, I encountered her framed rotting gerberas leaning against a wall in the studio complex. I wondered what it would be like to work for her rather than the artist I was working for. I imagined her studio full of rotting apples and flowers, maybe she became a Miss Haversham or Edith Beale in Grey Gardens.
I think often of morbid curiosity and/or failure. Chez Panisse chef Alice Waters serves a dessert of seasonal fruit uncut, unadorned, uncooked in its virgin state. The metaphor of a still life is there, where the luscious fruit is frozen in time but in reality, are long dead and rotted away. I love Vanitas paintings for this reason, there is no artifice, only the truth that everything eventually fades away.
I heard that because of the air and moisture-controlled environment of the galleries at Turner Contemporary, the apples strung-up in Falling from Grace (2000) will not rot in a way they have previously, their end will be a shrivelling, the moisture slowly leaving them.
Strung-up, tethered with metal cables, confined behind glass. These artworks bring to mind bondage and the gothic/erotic. I was a huge fan of Angela Carter at school, I studied The Bloody Chamber, and felt a little too naïve to fully grasp the subtext of sadomasochism, control and a willingness to be controlled. The sheer size of the ash tree in The inner space within(2008/2024) and the metal cables supporting, (or is it restraining?) fills the room with tension. A fungal infection (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus) is sweeping through woodlands and destroying ash trees across Europe. “Hymen scyphus fraxineus” in Latin translates as “Hymen cup ash”. Hymen is from the Greek “hymen” meaning skin, membrane or seam.
This tree stands, although artificially, like the last great giant. I thought of Gulliver’s Travels or King Kong, tethered and dethroned.
Anya Gallaccio, The inner space within, 2008 2024, © Jo Underhill 2024
The order and repetition in the large macramé hop twine nets are repeated in the clay extrusion work Beautiful Minds… (dene hole) (2024), but the software in this work experiences a kind of breakdown resulting in a pile-up of clay and a collapse. We had just missed the machine operating and all was quiet. Jupiter told me children at school sometimes wear ear defenders when they feel overwhelmed by loud noises. I thought of the software feeling overwhelmed by the relentless noise of the machinery.
Some of these previous iterations or “failures” (all Untitled) are shown in another gallery, fired and glazed, suggesting waves, fungi, sausage fingers. Freud said children develop ideas of disgust from shame around excrement. I watched Jupiter play with the clay in a plastic bag in the gallery sensory bag, completely engrossed in squeezing the clay between the plastic.
Anya Gallaccio, Beautiful Minds... (dene hole), 2024, © Jo Underhill 2024
On the walls of the gallery were large-scale marbled works on paper, formed from earth, sand mineral, ash, apple, oak gall, Margate beach, “Pia’s” tidepool and, ground-up “Melissa’s and Angela’s” mussel shells. I wasn’t sure who “Pia” was but I presumed “Angela’s” refers to the Fish restaurant in Margate and “Melissa” is the Curator at Turner Contemporary; these three women’s names conjured up ideas of a coven of assistants. Seers used fire and smoke to create images to be interpreted. The Occultist and Surrealist Ithell Colquhoun used this method, “fumage” as the starting point for her artworks, waiting for images and figures to come to her.
In the last, dimmed corridor gallery there are more marbled works (all Untitled) but this time formed from ground-up semi-precious stones and other earth pigments, framed behind glass, showing embellishments as signs of their ageing like damp-damaged antiquarian prints or maps.
In traditional bookbinding, the marbled pages are the first and last pages of the binding of the book. The beginning and the end.
https://turnercontemporary.org/whats-on/anya-gallaccio-preserve/