Anya Gallaccio

In conversation with Michael Archer

From Audio Arts 1992

Transcript

Exhibited during summer 1992 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Anya Gallaccio’s Red on Green was the latest in a series of installations she had made using cut flowers. Here the artist talks to Michael Archer and describes her involvement with her materials.

Michael Archer: As you walk upstairs at the ICA towards the Nash Room, halfway up the final staircase you are met by this smell which is sweet but also quite thick. In the room itself, at the top of the staircase, there is laid out on the floor a carpet of roses to which nothing has been done.

Anya Gallaccio: Well, they have actually had a lot of things done to them. There are ten thousand roses and I pulled all the heads off, so you have actually got a bed with all the stalks and thorns underneath and all the heads lying on the top. Because a lot of the roses were really blown and open because of the time of the year, when we touched them a lot of them just fell to pieces, which is why in some areas it looks just like petals. Then again, that reminds me of the thing you do with daisies – he loves me, he loves me not, etc. – and you pull all of the petals off. I wanted it to be a painting – a bed and also a painting. Initially the surface was incredibly luxurious and velvety and you just wanted to roll in it. Well, that is what I hoped people would want to do, but now it looks quite dry. I saw the surface as the surface of a painting, maybe, but because the roses were virtually all the same colour but were all different reds, to use each one as a mark, and as the light changed in here the colour changed a lot.

MA: Does it have a title?

AG: It’s called Red on Green, which is from a Rothko painting. I use that because I wanted there to be some kind of emotional response to the thing. Also because I’d had some of the roses at home to do an experiment, and the red seemed to hover the way the colours in his paintings do – kind of glow. I wanted to use the whole of the roses and I wanted there to be a title which was very descriptive but also had something else – another connotation. I was thinking about what red and green symbolise. Red symbolises passion, rage, and is a hot colour, and green represents jealousy or naivety. I don’t see this particularly as being about love, but it came initially from seeing an article about a garden of love. I like the idea of having this red, this passion, if you want to look at it in that way, on top of naivety or jealousy. I didn’t want the green to be evident at the beginning when the flowers were really full. I wanted it to be just red with a hint of green, but obviously as the flowers are drying out, more and more of the green is becoming exposed.

MA: That leads to another thing I want to ask about, which is the place that ‘not knowing’ has in the work that you do.

AG: I see the work much more as a collaboration between me and the materials. I have an idea as to what they might do, but basically the materials always do what they want. I kind of feel disappointed by this piece – I don’t know why. Actually it is interesting and it has done lots of things, but that element of chance to me is really important. I think that I’m not imposing my power as the artist over my materials. Artists are supposed to be good at what they do and supposed to impose their will over their paint or their stones. I see it much more as a fluid thing, as a relationship in the way that you have a relationship with a person, and you might be able to anticipate the way they are going to respond to the situation but hopefully they will surprise you, or they should in a good relationship. Whatever kind of relationship that is, there is always this fluid thing, and that is what interests me. I am just starting something off and seeing if it does something. Of course, sometimes you are disappointed and sometimes you are not, you are surprised. I don’t have a way that I want people to read the work. This is just ten thousand roses on the floor. That is all that it is but, maybe for some people, it will be something else. Maybe I don’t know and maybe it doesn’t matter if it isn’t, but I don’t want the work to be read only in an intuitive, female way.