What Happens When an Artist Obsessed With Decay Meets Molten Glass?

Most museums devote enormous effort to keeping their collections from changing. Temperature, humidity and light are carefully controlled so an artwork will look essentially the same decades from now.

Anya Gallaccio has built much of her career around the opposite idea.

The internationally exhibited artist creates installations from organic and perishable materials—including flowers, fruit, chocolate, sugar and ice—and then allows time to become part of the work. Flowers wilt. Apples rot. Ice melts. Chocolate changes in scent and appearance.

The finished result can be difficult to predict—and sometimes impossible to preserve.

Gallaccio is now bringing that fascination with transformation to one of Tacoma’s hottest and most permanent-seeming artistic environments. She is serving as a visiting artist at the Museum of Glass starting today through Sunday, September 13.

The museum has not announced what Gallaccio intends to make during her five-day Hot Shop residency. That uncertainty is particularly appropriate for an artist whose work frequently depends upon chance, natural processes and materials that refuse to remain unchanged.

Gallaccio emerged in Britain’s contemporary-art scene during the late 1980s and participated in Freeze, the influential exhibition organized by Damien Hirst. She was nominated for Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize in 2003 and has presented solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and Turner Contemporary.

Among her previous projects, Gallaccio has arranged flowers and allowed them to decompose, created installations involving rotting apples and displayed a massive block of ice with a core of rock salt that gradually melted from within. Other works have pursued the opposite transformation, recreating trees and fruit in bronze, ceramic and other durable materials.

That tension between the temporary and the permanent makes the Museum of Glass residency especially intriguing.

Glass begins as a molten, constantly moving substance before cooling into something that may survive for centuries. Gallaccio’s best-known materials begin with their own beauty but change, deteriorate or disappear. What happens when an artist interested in impermanence begins experimenting with a medium known for preserving form?

The residency is part of a continuing collaboration between the Museum of Glass and Pilchuck Glass School. Artists first spend time experimenting at Pilchuck before continuing their work during a five-day residency in Tacoma. Museum Hot Shop specialists assist them with the technical demands of a material many visiting artists have not previously used.

That collaboration is particularly important in Gallaccio’s case. She is not primarily known as a glass artist. The purpose is to give her access to a new material—and see how it might alter ideas already present in her work.

Visitors can watch live glassmaking inside the Hot Shop whenever the museum is open, although the visiting artist may not be working continuously throughout every public hour. The Museum of Glass also operates a free Hot Shop livestream for people unable to attend in person.

The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Its traditional galleries remain closed during a major renovation, but the Hot Shop, Grand Hall, Education Studio, store and café remain open. Admission is currently $18 for adults, $16 for seniors and military members, and $9 for children ages 6 through 18.

Gallaccio’s Tacoma project may ultimately produce a lasting object—or simply an experiment that points toward something else. With this artist, not knowing exactly how the work will end is part of the reason to watch it begin.