Central in the work of Anya Gallaccio is the exploration of the tension between organic and traditional sculptural materials and thus the relationship between nature and culture. Water, flowers, chocolate alternate with lead, wood and bronze. Gallaccio often forces the organic material in a more traditional language of forms, whereas she uses traditional materials to freeze moments of nature. For example, Gallaccio formed salt distilled from sea water into minimalistic bricks to form a cube, placed on the beach at the waterline. The cube slowly disappeared with the incoming tide, the salt returning to the sea.

Gallaccio made the sugar columns because she was interested in the question how sugar would look after it had passed through a similar production process as the sugarbeet. Not only the making process was important for Gallaccio, also the visual power of the resulting work. The syrupy columns with their temporal evasive quality pleased her. Moreover, this impossibility to instantly recognize what they are made of forces the viewer to look again. And it is exactly this that seems to be the core of Gallaccio’s practice, to make people look again at things often overlooked in life.