Anya Gallaccio is an artist who works with organic materials such as flowers, fruit, sugar and ice to create (largely) impermanent artworks that change over time.

Preserve Beauty (1991) is one of my favourite pieces of her work. Several hundred red gerbera flowers are pressed and held behind a sheet of glass and left to gradually decompose.

Beauty is the name of this particular red gerbera that Gallaccio uses. Gerberas are a mass produced standardised commercial product and are the result of human intervention. Here they have been grown and then cut in their prime, at their most beautiful, and left to die.

This gradual process is seen over a period of weeks and questions our perception of beauty.

Preserve Beauty is reminiscent of the Dutch vanitas paintings of the 16^th and 17th centuries. Vanitas paintings which show objects that are symbolic of the brevity and transience of life and of the inevitability of death. They are seen as a meditation on decay, change and mortality.

Find out more about Anya Gallaccio

I was commissioned to make an artwork for Surreal Solihull, a public art project with Solihull Council in collaboration with public art consultant/curator Ruth Millington.

This is a bit about where I got my inspiration from as well as details of the brief and the exhibition.

The Brief

The artist’s brief was create new work in response to the theme of ‘Surreal’; to celebrate Solihull’s history of Surrealism, a 20th century cultural movement that challenged reality by exploring the unconscious mind and dreams.

Solihull was once home to one of Surrealism’s leading members, Emmy Bridgwater (1906 – 1999). During her successful career, she drew, painted and collaged strange, dreamlike landscapes of her mind. Birds, butterflies, mythological women, and wide eyes populate her symbolic pictures in which irrational images are juxtaposed. This same imagery can be found in her poetry, which she published in Surrealist magazines during her lifetime. She was also a proponent of automatic drawing.

Surrealism

Surrealism was a cultural and intellectual movement that flourished across Europe in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Founded in 1924 by the poet André Breton who defined Surrealism as:

“pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought.”

Surrealism reacted against the Enlightenment—the influential 18th-century intellectual movement that championed reason and individualism. Instead, Surrealism’s goal was to liberate thought, language, and human experience from the oppressive boundaries of rationalism and for artist, writers, poets and thinkers to explore the irrational, unconscious mind.

Having studied the psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud, Breton was particularly interested in the idea that the unconscious mind—which produced dreams—was the source of artistic creativity; this became a key theme of many Surrealist artworks, writings and performances.

Contemporary artists continue to take inspiration from this radical art movement.

Read more about Surrealism.

 Emmy Bridgwater (1906-1999)

On 11 June 1936, the International Surrealist Exhibition opened in London. Visitors were amazed as Salvador Dalí delivered a lecture while wearing a full deep-sea diving suit. None was more impacted by this dramatic arrival of Surrealism in Britain than a 30-year-old artist and poet: Emma ‘Emmy’ Bridgwater who invoked the Surrealist principle of juxtaposing unusual objects to reveal uncanny narratives; in her paintings and ink drawings viewers are invited into interior worlds, defined by a symbolic language of birds, eggs and organic forms.

She experimented with automatic ink drawing as a means of accessing and expressing her subconscious. Impressed, Breton wrote in the 1940s: “Bridgwater brought a new purity of outlook to British Surrealism, returning to the early days of the movement, to its ‘automatic’ beginnings in France”. He invented her to Paris – to sign a Surrealist manifesto and exhibit her works in a major gallery show.

Read more about Emmy Bridgwater.

 My inspiration for When You Come This Way 2025. (Acrylic paint on board).

My artwork was inspired by Solihull’s coat of arms, blending symbols that represent both the urban and the rural, while connecting to Bridgwater’s love of birds. The ruff represents Shakespeare’s connection to the area and his plays that were set in rural locations but performed on urban stages: the goldfinch inhabits both gardens and woodlands : the hunting dog is now equally at home as a pet.

The Exhibition

 The outdoor exhibition Surreal Solihull will be on display in Solihull town centre until May 31^st 2025 and can be accessed at any time.

Find out about all 30 commissioned artists.

The Emmy Bridgwater Estate has endorsed the project and exhibition

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) by Cornelia Parker

Another artist who I find inspirational is Cornelia Parker. Much of her work involves destruction followed by resurrection and reconfiguration.

A theme in what inspires me seems to be emerging!

I love all of her work but Cold Dark Matter was the first piece of hers that I ever saw and I was transfixed by it when I saw it in Tate Modern, London.

To make the work Parker collaborated with the army to blow up a shed and it’s contents. The remnants were suspended from ceiling as if in mid explosion and were lit by a single light bulb which cast shadows on the gallery’s walls. I remember the shadows giving the impression that the work was expanding ever outwards and indeed it has been likened to the big bang – hence the title.

But like the previous artwork I wrote about (Blow Up by Ori Gersht) it is re configured into something very quiet and contemplative, the antithesis of the violence it took to create the piece.

The use of everyday objects is something everyone can relate to, whether in a practical or sentimental way. To see them like this is a reminder of the fragility of our existence. Or at least that’s how it made me feel.

Read the full story about Cold Dark Matter here.

The first in a series of blog posts about artworks, artists or anything else that has inspired me

Blow Up (2007- 8) by Ori Gersht

I saw this work in an exhibition in London called Vanitas: The Transience of Earthly Pleasures (2010). A group show exploring the vanitas genre concerning the transience of life and the futlity of earthly desires, often represented with symbols such as candles, insects, mirrors and flowers. Subject matter I often use.

The exhibition was incredible but the piece of work that most captivated me was Blow Up (2007-8) by Ori Gersht – a series of large photographs capturing the process of the detonation of a flower arrangement.

Blow Up (above) was inspired by the still life floral oil painting called The Rosy Wealth of June (1886) (below)  by the French painter Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904).

Gersht froze his re creation of this flower arrangement in liquid nitrogen and concealed small explosive charges within it. He then detonated them and used several cameras to capture the instantaneous moment of explosion using very fast camera speeds of seven and a half thousandths of a second.

The speed is too fast for the brain to process but technology can capture it and show us its reality.

It is extremely beautiful and very violent. I have to admit that I found it mesmerizingly beautiful for a long time before I considered the destruction and violence. But even then I find the destruction beautiful, or rather, the photographs of the destruction. So maybe the photograph is standing between me (the viewer) and the reality of what is happening (the explosion), and so the destruction becomes more of an abstract concept?

It definitely makes me think of the ephemeral and vulnerable condition of nature and humankinds hand in ruining it, which is what much of my artwork is concerned with.

To read more about Ori Gersht visit his website

Still Life with Flowers

Still life has been a constant subject throughout the history of art and came to the fore in the seventeenth century. However, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the French called it nature morte (dead nature) emphasizing the layered symbolism of this genre with its reminders of the transience of life and the inevitability of death.

Flowers are a common feature of still life art and I often use wild flowers in my artwork.

In my latest series called Shifting Shadows I have used the shadow as an additional symbol. The shadow in art has many meanings including the fleeting nature of existence, isolation and a distorted copy of reality.

Shifting shadows plays with these ideas questioning which is the reality and which is the shadow?

flowers and shadows

I was invited by Stratford Upon Avon Art Society to give them a talk about my art practice.

It is a very active society with a membership of about 400 and they are extremely well organised. They have a very varied programme of events and they book speakers over a year in advance in order to ensure they get the people that they want.

It was a great opportunity for me to share my enthusiasm and knowledge of the cyanotype process.

I started by explaining how I got to where I am today. I was a radiographer before going back to university in Birmingham to do a BA and MA in Fine Art. I always tell people about the radiographic part of my life as I often feel that it relates to my art practise and my love of silhouettes.

I gave a brief history of the cyanotype process including the fact that the first photographic book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. was published by Anna Atkins using the cyanotype process in 1843.

I went on to discuss practicalities including my preferred cyanotype formula, paper choices and exposure times.

I fell in love with the cyanotype process when I used it to make some new work for a solo exhibition a few years ago. Instead of seeing its restrictions I could only see possibilities. So I continued my talk with examples of how I make my art and what my influences are.

I discussed pitfalls and how to resolve them and I showed examples of what common faults looked like including over and under exposure.

Other subjects I talked about included how to make wet cyanotypes and how to tone cyanotypes using natural products to create other colours rather than the natural blue and white ‘blueprint’.

The large audience made me feel very welcome and really engaged with me and asked lots of very interesting questions.

If you’d like to find out more, either about giving a talk, or about my process, please get in touch.