Anya Gallaccio: Falling from Grace
The apple represents both purity and temptation, the loss of innocence. The apple tree is a work of art, constructed from our fantasies and desires. It is engineered to produce the perfect product. The apple may be innocent yet it is created by our desire for perfection and from some ideal of purity. All landscape has now been cultivated or interfered with, even if this intervention is to try and preserve an idea of nature as untouched.
The work falling from grace is in two parts. The first part gallery based, a visual, physical experience. A curtain made from 1200 red apples.The apples are all the same, yet different. A still life. Something physical, tangeable, beautiful and real. The seeds and the pulp from these apples will be removed from the gallery and planted in a circle aprox 2 metres in diameter. Some of these seeds will germinate. Later the seedling will be transplanted and the diameter of the circle will grow. This process is repeated until in a long time (7 years?) there will be an orchard of saplings and eventually fruit bearing trees(10years?). Some of the saplings may be removed from the main body of the work, but the aim is to cultivate an orchard of wildlings, because of the importance of chance in this project I want to allow as many of the trees as is practical to exist. Apple trees are not produced from seed. It is too slow and unreliable a process. Apple trees are carefully constructed from hardy rootstock grafted with the fruit of choice. Apple trees from seed wildlings do not grow true to type they revert back and rarely produce good fruit. However once in a while a new variety of note is discovered this way; Bramleys and Cox being two English examples.
In a time where time is money and the collective world agricultural policy demands sameness in the name of quality at the expensense of taste. Many fruit and vegetable varieties are being lost for ever. My orchard may be a folly. In time I hope that it will again be a beautiful place where all the trees will be different, unique and maybe even one of them will produce a fruit worthy of savouring.
