The Anya Gallaccio exhibition you see at Turner Contemporary will not be the same as the Anya Gallaccio exhibition I saw. In the brief interval between my visiting Preserve, and the publication of this review, certain objects will have diminished and others flourished. As with sensitive entities of the natural realm, each artwork in this exhibition has its own intrinsic seasonality.
La Dolce Vita, first staged in 1994, is a bank of candles melting into freeform waxy puddles on a huge sheet of foil. The candles are replaced as they melt. By show’s end they will flicker atop a wavy mass having constructed their own sculpture with only the barest intervention. To visit during its earliest phases of growth is to encounter the work before it accrues charisma.
On the wall alongside is Preserve “Beauty”, an early work from a series using cut flowers. Here, 1,700 red gerberas are held between sheets of glass: four panels of velvety speckled crimson, like a sequence of abstract paintings. Gradually they will brown and moulder, leaving, by the end, little more than dried ooze and frilly husks. Gallaccio selected gerberas as a mass-produced, standardised commercial “product” – already the result of human intervention. “Beauty”, the variety the work was titled after in 1991, has been discontinued. (Isn’t that always the way with your favourite products?) These carry the less poetic moniker of “Rodeo”.
Glass has a particular role in preservation. It once housed the jam in the sandwich I ate on the train to Margate. It protects wine, vinegar, soy sauce, kimchi, confits and pickles. It shields paintings and keeps museum artefacts dustless. Glasshouses nurture exotic species. The impact of the glass sheets on the gerberas is catastrophic: they are crushed, sweaty, and overheated. As 17th-century “vanitas” paintings remind us, nothing can be preserved without undergoing a transformation.
Gallaccio creates art as theatre from which the human body is removed. It is a very slow form of theatre. Change is only visible over repeat visits, yet you are aware of time passing. The ultimate expression of this was Intensities and Surfaces (1996) in which a 32-tonne cube of ice was eroded by a block of rock salt as it melted over three months inside an old power station in east London. For evident practical reasons (the weight, the water) Intensities and Surfaces has not been restaged here. Instead, there is the milder, more fragrant decay of Falling from Grace (2000) for which 2,700 Gala apples have been strung on lengths of hop twine forming a Valentine’s red curtain.
In 2008, Gallaccio moved from London to California, firing her interest in the particularities of the Earth, and the impact of geology on human culture. On the Kent coast she has been attentive to locale. An outsized macrame net, hand-knotted in hop twine, tumbles in waves across the picture windows of the atrium – an object both of the sea and of the land. The apples in Falling from Grace are Kent-grown. Their seeds will be saved to form a hedge around a garden of rare apple trees Gallaccio is designing with local schools.
In the show’s mechanical finale, a vast 3D printer slowly builds up the interior shape of a Kentish “dene hole” – an ancient three-lobed chalk mine. The printer extrudes a mixture of porcelain and chalk, squeezing out one layer each day at noon, then leaving it to dry before applying the next. The clay is soft and slumping, ill-suited as a building material. Gallaccio is interested in the gulf between the ambition of her construction and the capabilities of the material, and what odd forms will emerge as a result.
The impermanence of much of Gallaccio’s work is a considered riposte to the swaggering arrogance of the monumental ambition to permanence, whether bronze statues glorifying lives forgotten within three generations, or marks cut into the living rock of a landscape. Gallaccio does work in bronze, but her chosen subjects for this ennobling material are things unloved, overlooked and discarded, that have found their own peculiar shape. A cast pair of stalks from denuded brussels sprout plants lean against the wall like a pair of crested walking sticks. The alien life forms in a little vitrine turn out to have been the shape of shrivelled potatoes.
In the show’s most dramatic gesture, the crown of a dead ash tree is installed so that its extremities touch each wall of the gallery it occupies. After the show it will return to the forest – a home for insects and fungi that will rot it back into the soil. It is a beautiful answer to a question that sits at the heart of Gallaccio’s work: how do you create sculptural spectacle, yet tread lightly on the Earth?
• At Turner Contemporary, Margate, until 26 January
