ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #3

Anya Gallaccio @ Tate Britain

British artist Anya Gallaccio often works with organic materials, such as flowers and fruit, and relishes the unpredictable nature of the results. Gallaccio recently opened an exhibition of new work in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain and Mark Sladen spoke to her about one of the works made especially for the space -- a giant installation involving seven oak trees.

Mark Sladen: Where did you the trees and did how you got them into the gallery?

Anya Gallaccio: The trees came from a sustainable estate just outside Reading. Because I wanted to have the spurs (the bits which flare out at the base of the trunk) I had to have the trees specially felled -- we had to dig around them and then push them over. Lifting and manoeuvring the logs was a particularly nerve-racking ordeal, as I wanted to ensure that the bark was in the best possible condition when it entered the gallery. The heaviest of the trunks is two and a half tons and there are only certain areas of the gallery that are able to take that kind of weight. I had the floor marked up with the safe zones and I had seven cardboard dummies made up, which I pushed around to determine the installation. The trees were bought in one at a time over a period of a week and I couldn't play around with them once they were in the space.

MS: What was it like working in the Duveen?

AG: It is both a very elegant and a challenging space. There are very few shows that I can really remember as installations. The most successful have been those in which the space has been allowed to participate: the Richard Serra and Chris Burden installations, for example. The Duveen Galleries are the spine of the building, a very public place, a sculpture hall -- or a very grand corridor. I initially spent time there watching how people moved through the space. It was quite depressing, as everyone is in a hurry to get somewhere else or to find someone else. I wanted to find a way to slow people down, to force them to negotiate my intervention.

MS: Does the work achieve the effect you intended and have any of the reactions to it surprised you?

AG: I had to leave the country straight after the opening, so I do not know how people are responding to it. I feel a bit awkward talking about it in this way, because mentally I am stuck between installing and it being done -- I have not spent any time in the finished work so I haven't been able to digest the reality of the materials in the space. But I was personally pleased with how it worked out. The positioning of the stumps encourages you to walk through them, come up close to them and experience their scale. For me the trunks function both as formal structures and as trees, so that they hover backwards and forwards between being columns and being a forest.

Mark Sladen is a curator at Barbican Art Gallery

beat by Anya Gallaccio, supported by Malvern Water, until 20 January 2003
Tate Britain, Millbank, London SE1, 020.7887.8000


Image © the artist, courtesy Lehmann Maupin, photograph by Steve White

© 2002 KultureFlash Limited