Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In Anya Gallaccio’s handsome double-height studio in west London, a bleached-blond assistant called Matt is grinding mussel shells into a lilac-coloured powder. “We’re making drawings with this and chalk that we’ve brought up from the beach,” says Gallaccio, pointing to sheets of alum-stiffened paper on which faint marks are starting to take shape.It’s a rather orthodox project by Gallaccio’s standards. She is better known for arranging flowers in military rows between layers of glass and letting them rot until they turn black. She paints the walls of rooms with chocolate. Her work is performative and ephemeral and multisensory, and often plays with the idea of ordinary items doing extraordinary things. Though even here, she doesn’t really know how the mussels and the chalk will land on the paper. “The process,” she says, “is about letting go.”The works in chalk will be part of Gallaccio’s first survey exhibition, at Turner Contemporary in Margate. It’s been quite a wait: she’s 61 years old and was a Turner Prize nominee in 2003.But Gallaccio, who was very much a part of the Young British Artists group — studying alongside Damien Hirst, Michael Landy et al at Goldsmiths’ College in London; taking part in Hirst’s Freeze exhibition in 1988 — left the UK in 2008. While her peers had started making money on the exploding art market, Gallaccio’s work had perhaps proved less marketable. Take, for example, a heroic block of ice made of slabs arranged around a rock salt core that took over three months to melt — and did so quite exquisitely. Gallaccio is a storyteller, and this one was about transience in nature and life. But it was a hard sell.“I was offered a job teaching at the University of California in San Diego, with an enormous studio as part of the deal, and I wanted to see if my work would change in that huge expanded south-west American landscape,” she says. “I wanted to see myself from the outside. I wanted the adventure.” I’ve always had a problem with objects and permanence. But something happening over a long, long time — that is excitingThe teaching really took off, and she travelled widely, seeing the scintillating effect of the Texan sun on Donald Judd’s aluminium boxes in Marfa. Her work, not so much. “No one there knew the whole me. They knew me as a teacher — they didn’t know what I did, the whole diva me, the meaning of Goldsmiths,” she says, frankly. She tells me they found her abrasive too. “Californians are not direct like I am.”Though finding it hard to extricate herself from a well-paid job, Gallaccio has been trying for a while to get back to London, where she grew up. In spring she took her last class, and back she most certainly is, in both geography and impact. Apart from the show in Margate, she created a chocolate room, transforming a disused shop into a cocoa box, which opened in early September in Paisley, near Glasgow, where she was born. “To me, it’s a jumping-off point, a conversation-starter,” she says. “What can art be? Is it decadent to paint a room with chocolate? And of course, it’s from complicated colonial places. There’s a history of immigration, exploitation, child labour. Lots of threads to unravel.”In June, she won the commission for the first permanent HIV/Aids memorial in London, due to be unveiled in 2027. “When I got that commission, a lot of people — including my gay male friends — said, ‘Why now?’” she says. “But just because they’re managing [HIV/Aids] with various medications, it hasn’t gone away. What about the women in sub-Saharan Africa? The intravenous drug users? And what about all the people we have lost?” The sculpture will include two large steel rings, like slices through tree trunks. “It’s not confrontational,” she says, “but it is big. It will make its presence felt.”Gallaccio’s Grade II-listed studio was purpose-built in 1889 for the artist HR Pinker. Its next occupant was Kenneth Armitage, a powerful postwar sculptor who gained an international reputation for large-scale semi-abstract bronzes. Since his death in 2002, a two-year stint here is awarded to the chosen Kenneth Armitage fellow. Upstairs, in an equally generous apartment, Gallaccio is living with her partner of 23 years, American artist Kelly Eginton. “It’s great to be back, to be here and be normal,” she says. Artists including Gary Hume and Gillian Wearing are still in London, still friends.In the centre of the studio is an imposing metal gantry used by sculptors to hoist heavy works. Gallaccio has turned it into a loom, weaving a vast macramé net of hop twine as a centrepiece for the Margate show. “We’ve been working on it for three months,” she says. “At least two people five days a week.” Staff from Turner Contemporary are also busy knotting, down in Kent. “It’s like a lot of my work. It’s about repetition, seriality,” she continues. “One material, one process. When I lay out the gerberas,” she says of her flower works, “there’s no gesture, just a system.” You could say that the results turn into art by default, the gerberas mulching together tones of red and black like a Rothko painting. But Gallaccio’s work cleaves closely to the traditions of both art and craft. The flowers are part of the world of Vanitas paintings — groupings of objects, sometimes skulls, sometimes withering fruits — that speak of the inevitability of the end. The value of her nets or chocolate rooms or reconstructed trees lies in their labour and the time taken, and in the role of the individual at the service of the greater whole.There will be gerberas in Margate; a heavy curtain of apples; an ash tree — felled due to its sickness from dieback — reconstructed in an upper gallery. A 3D-printing machine will gradually create the form of a denehole, a particular kind of deep shaft dug in the Kent landscape for the extraction of chalk.“Nearly everything in the show has something to do with the locality,” says Gallaccio. “The chalk, the apples. A local company, which makes church candles, will recycle the wax left from candles burning down on to sheets of tinfoil.” Such circularity has always been fundamental to her. The lead floor she poured for the Freeze exhibition — like a luxurious and deeply material rejoinder to the minimal froideur of Carl Andre’s floor arrangement of thin metal plates — was scraped up and melted down. The apples will be pulped, their pips removed and replanted in a spiral on land that the gallery has been given to make an orchard. (It will also be part of a big education project that will run alongside the show.)The orchard, it turns out, is the most compelling part. “I’ve always had a problem with objects and permanence,” she says. “But the idea of time, something happening over a long, long time, that is exciting.” It turns out that an orchard has been on her mind for at least 20 years. “Look at me now!” she laughs, pulling on her denim apron. “I’ve got a fancy studio and a fancy assistant. And now, I’ve got an orchard!”September 28-January 26, turnercontemporary.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
