ART-PRESENTATION: Anya Gallaccio-Dreamed About The Flowers…

Anya Gallaccio creates site-specific, minimalist installations and often works with organic matter (including chocolate, sugar, flowers and ice). Her use of organic materials results in natural processes of transformation and decay, meaning that Gallaccio is unable to predict the end result of her installations. Something which at the start of an exhibition may be pleasurable, such as the scent of flowers or chocolate, would inevitably become increasingly unpleasant over time.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: National Trust Archive

The timely and site-specific nature of Anya Gallaccio’s work make it notoriously difficult to document. Her work therefore challenges the traditional notion that an art object or sculpture should essentially be a monument within a museum or gallery. Instead her work often lives through the memory of those that saw and experienced it – or the concept of the artwork itself. Anya Gallaccio created a new artwork entitled “dreamed about the flowers that hide from the light” at Lindisfarne Castle in United kingdom. Throughout the rooms of the castle Anya Gallaccio has installed giant open cubic frames of oak (referencing Lutyens’ ceiling-beams), over which soft heavy blankets are loosely draped. Each blanket has been dyed a different single color, using plant extracts and old techniques. A few signature flowers are threaded here and there: their intended wilting during the exhibition provides one time-based element; but the ruffling and disruption of the drapery by visitors, and the more gradual fading of the natural dyes in the light, provide others. She spent time researching the flora and fauna found in the garden today, as well as ones long since gone. Their rich, ever-changing shades gave her the inspiration for a landscape of color for the blankets, which proposes life returning to the castle. These colous fade with sunlight and the shifting of the seasons. As the artist says, “Lindisfarne is a very special place. It’s a place I have always been really intrigued by. It’s an amazing opportunity. How often do you get free rein of a castle? The opportunity to inhabit it briefly is not one to turn down”. The castle’s long periods of “in-between-ness” also intrigued and inspired Anya. A ruin in 1901 when Edward Hudson bought it, it was transformed into a home by Sir Edwin Luytens. The National Trust took over its care in 1944 and it has remained unoccupied, still furnished as if frozen in time, waiting for Edward to return and life to start again. Also her installation makes reference to this and suggests both a house shut up and protected for the winter and the transition it has just been through during the conservation project, to once again bring it to life.

Info: Lindisfarne Castle, Holy Island, Northumberland, duration: 5/5-4/11/18, Days & Hours: Castle 10:00-16:00, Garden: All day, www.nationaltrust.org.uk