Anya Gallaccio

Transformation at the hands of nature and time provides the link between Jeff McMillan’s weather-infused paintings and Anya Gallaccio’s frequent use of organic or fugitive materials. The promise of decay is inherent in making work from roses, gerberas, oranges, and chocolate, not to mention the shifting states suggested by works in sand, salt chalk and ice. Time is an active ingredient in almost all of Anya’s projects: dictating the passage from the moment of a work’s creation to the inevitability of its decomposition or destruction. In this work from 2003 the process is arrested – held and trapped - between the panes of glass in a pair of doors which themselves offer the defunct promise of an entrance, or a means of passing from one state to another.

In 2012 Anya was the 16th artist to make a work for our public art project 'Billboard for Edinburgh' – with a photograph from her on-going series of microscopic close-ups. This became a more complicated project than originally envisaged: her choice of subject was a fragment of dirt from ‘Arthur’s Seat’, the volcanic outcrop that dominates the Edinburgh skyline on the horizon behind the billboard site. In order for her to make this work she asked us to send samples of soil to her San Diego studio. These were consistently impounded by US customs, but on the third attempt an unmarked envelope of muddy contraband finally made it through.