Artist Interview: Anya Gallaccio

By Neil Cooper, 13.09.2024

Anya Gallaccio, image courtesy of Neil Hanna

Anya Gallaccio may not have any memory of Paisley, where she was born, but the Turner Prize nominated artist’s new installation ‘Stroke’, currently gracing the Renfrewshire mecca’s High Street is a homecoming of sorts in other ways. ‘Stroke’, after all, is the latest iteration of a work first seen in Scotland in 2014 at Jupiter Artland, the sculpture park on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where Gallaccio has a permanent work, ‘The light pours out of me’ (2012), in situ. As before with ‘Stroke’, Gallaccio has painted the walls of a room in chocolate, leaving an ever-changing sensory feast in its wake.

 In Paisley, this has seen Gallaccio take over a disused shop, transforming it into an elegant looking chocolaty paradise designed to entice passers-by into its sweetly scented interior. Sitting between a branch of WH Smith and Tech Doctor, and with signs for a long-closed clothing alterations emporium still in the windows above, ‘Stroke’s’ ornately painted exterior and flower adorned window is a classy looking proposition, whatever it might be selling.

 The work forms part of Jupiter Artland’s roving art and learning programme, Jupiter +. With support from Renfrewshire Council’s regeneration project, Future Paisley, ‘Stroke’ follows on from ‘Don’t Buy Mi’, a shop-front installation by Rachel Maclean that moved into empty units in Perth and Ayr. In Stroke’s case, rather than some Willy Wonka style theme park, one should expect a more sensory experience, and much food for thought.

 “For me, it's important that the work isn’t really prioritising the visual,” says Gallaccio, sitting on a brown painted bench in the centre of the room. “The most significant thing when you come in here is the smell. That’s what you get hit by. Smell is something very heavily connected to memory, so being in here might trigger certain types of memories, or maybe when you leave here and you're in another context and eat chocolate, it might bring you back to this space. I think that is something that's really significant about this. It's not what it looks like, it's what it feels like, and what it smells like, that’s important.”

 With a major retrospective exhibition just opened in Margate, and a commission for a London AIDS memorial pending, there are more collective sense memories at play in ‘Stroke’ for Gallaccio.

 “The first time I made Stroke was in Vienna,” she recalls, “which is the city of chocolate, and the city of Freud, and the bench makes you think of a couch, and you could lie on it. Here, it has a totally different set of connotations. Depending on what your relationship is with food, if you have an eating disorder, maybe this is a very triggering space to be in. It's very confrontational. Other people who love chocolate might be disappointed in terms of how it works, but they're still getting that sense trigger from the smell. 

 “Then you can think of it more socially or politically in terms of immigration, labour, class, and thinking about where the chocolate came from and who made it. There's a lot of connections with chocolate and slavery, which ties in with a lot of the issues at the moment about reassessing our colonial, Imperial past.”

 As she talks, Gallaccio has somewhat appropriately just scoffed a chocolate cup cake from the press buffet across the road, where another empty shop-front in Paisley Shopping Centre has been transformed into Jupiter Learning Studio. While ‘Stroke’ awaits its audience, the Learning Centre is a hive of activity, as a horde of young people make screenprints bearing slogans about community and protest. Gallaccio sees the initiative as an integral part of the work.

 “Doing Stroke here was very deliberately chosen in relation to the project across the road,” she says, “which is about giving young people agency, and giving them a platform to be the leaders, the voices, and the driving force behind change. I think it's a really ambitious, amazing project, which is really close to my heart, and was one of the reasons I wanted to do this. It’s about giving something back.”

 As for ‘Stroke’ itself, by the end of December when the shop shuts, after four months, its chocolaty interior might be past its sell by date. This is something Gallaccio has experience of from when Stroke was presented in Switzerland in the basement of a derelict house set to be demolished. A year later, however, it was still there. 

 “It had grown all of this yellow furry mould, and was really extraordinary, but that was totally unexpected,” Gallaccio says. “It was just a fluke that it was still there and the curator was passing.”

 How Stroke develops and decays during its Paisley run might be worth sniffing out.

 “I guess the smell becomes slightly sour,” says Gallaccio, “but to me, that's really interesting in terms of how we respond to it. I hope it's as intellectually and emotionally engaging then as much as I hope it is now.” 

 

Anya Gallaccio’s installation Stroke is showing at 18 High Street, Paisley until 31st December