Anya Gallaccio: Silver Seed
Until September 30; Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute

Once a year, on Ash Wednesday, Catholics are given a stark reminder of their mortality. Ash is smudged onto the forehead, with a reminder “that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return”. It’s a difficult notion to digest: as humans we feel distinctly separate from the world around us, but one day our rotting corpses will become indistinguishable from the dirt.

To counter this inevitable fact, we strive for immortality through art. The stone temples of the Pharaohs, and the Celtic crosses of our forebears, were made to last forever. They might seem like materials with an afterlife-time guarantee, but any conservator will tell you that stone eventually perishes just like everything else. Art, in its own slower way, will also return to dust.

Cue Anya Gallaccio. The Paisley-born artist was nominated for the Turner Prize two years ago with her bronze apple tree, whose load of fresh apples was allowed to atrophy into a sticky mess over the course of the exhibition. In Gallaccio’s art, flowers rot, candles drip, chocolate festers and sugar melts. Sweet, pretty things become putrid and ugly, returning to dust before our eyes.

But it’s not all death and decay; when a flower’s petals drift and fade, its seeds create new life. When our bodies decay, we will of course be pushing up the daisies. This fundamental interdependency of life and death was central to pagan thinking; the legendary Green Man, with his oak tendrils, personified the annual cycle of death and regeneration.

There is something of that air of pagan worship in Gallaccio’s latest creation. On the island of Bute, standing tall in a forest of Mount Stuart’s conifers, is a silver pine tree. Its trunk stands straight, like a giant Greek pillar, reaching high up into the sky. Each flake of bark is coated in sparkling silver leaf, from the tree’s ferny base to its lofty canopy.

This is not, in the style of Gallaccio’s recent work, a modest twig-like tree whose wood has been usurped by bronze. This is a real living tree, magisterial in scale and symmetry. How the silver got there is a mystery, adding to the magical allure of the object. You sit at its base, staring up in wonderment. You are a worshipper in the presence of a tree god.

Scales of silvered bark lie on the ground around the tree, having flaked off quite naturally. They call to mind the artist’s Spanish project, in which she scattered 200 bronze pine cones on a forest floor. But whereas Gallaccio often destroys trees in order to make bronze casts, here the silver cast is thrown off by the living tree. While the silver coating emphasizes the architectural quality of the trunk, it also shows up its permanent state of flux.

Some distance away, still within the grounds of Mount Stuart, Gallaccio has lined the walls of a visitor centre with 16 black and white photographs of conifer seeds, taken with an electro-scanning microscope. Despite the scientific equipment, each of these images is a dream-world of its own. Unrecognisable as seeds, they evoke everything from romantic landscapes to whirling dancers.

The images have a luminosity redolent of the glowing silent movies of the 1920s. The textures range from rough and prickly to silky smooth and smoky, and in each one your imagination takes over. You see grass-topped sand dunes, alpine flowers, embryonic ants and weightless dancing nymphs.

When the Deep Impact mission recently crashed a projectile into Comet Tempel 1, it was because they wanted to investigate the dust released on impact. That same dust, they say, is the stuff from which the earth was made. Gallaccio’s images are the poetic equivalent, revealing a whole world in miniature inside one tiny seed.

This is a new direction for Gallaccio. The silver tree, and these wistful photos of its seeds, are dripping with fantasy. The artist has, in the past, revealed glimpses of this dreamy side through her works’ titles, borrowed from poetry and song lyrics. But Mount Stuart, with its whimsical architecture and fanciful decoration, has clearly affected Gallaccio, and she has allowed herself to be swept up in the flamboyant visions of its Victorian creators.

Inside the house itself, the artist has placed a handful of her previous works. Nine bronze potatoes, withered and sprouted, sit like mischievous creatures on an ornate Victorian writing desk. Again, these seed potatoes stand at the cusp between death and rebirth, and certainly seem more alive than the disused ink-wells and blotting pads which share their space.

In the same drawing room stands a bronze tree recently acquired by Paisley Museum and Art Galleries. Its branches are thorny and its berries silver, and it sprouts directly up from the wooden floor in the most elaborate of surroundings. Stained glass windows behind it depict the nine muses of Greek mythology, and it is flanked by gilt mirrors and chairs.

Despite its luxurious setting, this little tree asserts itself with quiet dignity. Perhaps too quiet;
its name, The Whirlwind In The Thorntree, comes from a Johnny Cash song about judgement day. In this overwhelming drawing room, where no space is left undecorated, the twiggy tree has more in common with a family pet than with the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

A pair of glass durian fruits adorn a table in the corner of the room, while next door in the purple library sits a selection of bronze bean pods with their contents strewn across a table. Real durian fruits are notorious for their nasty smell, but there is nothing pungent or rotting about any of the sculptures inside the stately home. Their unglamorous presence, in the midst of its flamboyant Victorian décor, is probably as much as the house can take.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 17.07.05