“I am interested in creating experiences, which don’t privilege the visual. I want to create a physical response and phenomenological encounter,” explains Anya Gallaccio, whose artworks include bronze trees hung with rotting apples, a chocolate-painted room, and 2,000 red gerberas pressed under glass frames.
Gallaccio, who was born in Paisley, Scotland, in 1963, shot to fame as one of the Young British Artists following the group show Freeze, put together by Damien Hirst in 1988. Now living and working in San Diego, she has just unveiled a new permanent sculpture in Manchester’s Whitworth Park: a steel tree, reimagining one lost during the gallery’s recent redevelopment.