Inspiration: Preserve Beauty

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