Anya Gallacio

Anya Gallaccio is a British installation artist who often works with organic materials, including chocolate, sugar, flowers and ice, exploring ideas of transformation and disintegration, decay and desiccation. Most of her work is by nature site specific, temporary and fluid in effect. Amongst her more permanent pieces is ‘the light pours out of me’, a contemporary take on the folly or grotto at Jupiter Artland. An essential addition to the great British estates during the 18th and 19th centuries, Gallaccio’s grotto is an altogether starker and more meditative affair. An enclosed concrete staircase leads down to a small open-topped room with walls of dark purple amethyst, a crystal with reputed healing properties, and obsidian, a volcanic glass valued for its cutting edge since at least the late Neolithic period and still used to create extremely sharp knives. The sunken room is at once a place of calm and seclusion and jagged tension.

Gallaccio’s powerful amethyst installation inspired X Muse’s ‘magic drops’, water infused, we like to imagine anyway, with the healing energy of the crystals and added in small amounts to our vodka at the later stages of its production.

A sculpted piece by Anya Gallaccio, The light pours out of me

ANYA GALLACCIO
The Light Pours out of Me, 2012

A profile picture of Anya