Anya Gallaccio's Recommended Reading List | Turner Contemporary

This reading list was created by Anya Gallaccio from the titles on the bookshelf in her studio. From poetry and feminism to environmentalism and apples, this selection reveals some of the inspirations, interests and thinking that underly her artistic practice.

The Complete Poems

Elizabeth Bishop, 1984

This is the definitive centenary edition of the work of one of America’s greatest poets, recognised today as a master of her art and acclaimed by poets and readers alike. Her poems display honesty and humour, grief and acceptance, observing nature and human nature with painstaking accuracy. They often start outwardly, with geography and landscape – from New England and Nova Scotia, where Bishop grew up, to Florida and Brazil, where she later lived – and move inexorably toward the interior, exploring questions of knowledge and perception, love and solitude, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos.

Silent Spring

Rachel Carson, 1962

Now recognized as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, Silent Spring exposed the destruction of wildlife through the widespread use of pesticides

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. Despite condemnation in the press and heavy-handed attempts by the chemical industry to ban the book, Carson succeeded in creating a new public awareness of the environment which led to changes in government and inspired the ecological movement. It is thanks to this book, and the help of many environmentalists, that harmful pesticides such as DDT were banned from use in the US and countries around the world.

If Not, Winter: Fragments Of Sappho

Anne Carson, 2003

From the critically acclaimed poet and classicist Anne Carson: a brilliant new translation of the work of Sappho, together with the original Greek.

During her life on the island of Lesbos, Sappho is said to have composed nine books of lyrics. Only one poem has survived complete. In If Not, Winter, Carson presents all the extant fragments of Sappho’s verse, employing brackets and white space to denote missing text – allowing the reader to imagine the poems as they were written.

Carson says of her method of translation: ‘I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through.’ And certainly her translation illuminates Sappho’s reflections on love and desire, her companions and rivals, the goddess Aphrodite, her own daughter, Kleis. IF NOT, WINTER gives us an extraordinary ancient poet brought alive by a brilliantly empathetic contemporary poet. Complete with Carson’s introduction and notes, it will become the standard translation of Sappho for our time.

What Happens between the Knots?: A Series of Open Questions

Anthony Huberman (editor), Jeanne Gerrity (editor), 2022

What happens between the knots? is the third book in the annual A Series of Open Questions published by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press. Each book in the series includes newly commissioned writing as well a selection of perspectives, images, and references related to the Wattis’s year-long research seasons dedicated to single artists. Each book takes the work of a single artist as its point of departure and spirals outward from there to create an expansive and carefully edited ecosystem of ideas and voices.

This third volume is informed by themes found in the work of Cecilia Vicuña, including ecofeminism, indigenous forms of knowledge, poetry and politics, dissolution and extinction, exile, dematerialization, regeneration, and environmental responsibility.

The Man Who Planted Trees

Jean Giono, 1953?? The version I can find is 1995

In 1910, while hiking through the wild lavender in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence, a man comes across a shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier. Staying with him, he watches Elzéard sorting and then planting hundreds of acorns as he walks through the wilderness.

Ten years later, after surviving the First World War, he visits the shepherd again and sees the young forest he has created spreading slowly over the valley. Elzéard’s solitary, silent work continues and the narrator returns year after year to see the miracle he is gradually creating: a verdant, green landscape that is a testament to one man’s creative instinct.

The Garden Against Time

Olivia Laing, 2024

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens.

Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

Pollution Is Colonialism

Max Liboiron, 2021

In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land.

Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)—an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Liboiron’s creative, lively, and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practised in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2021

A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction.

Life Between the Tides: In Search of Rockpools and Other Adventures Along the Shore

Adam Nicolson, 2022

In Life Between the Tides, Adam Nicolson explores the natural wonders of the shoreline, from the extraordinary biology of its curious animals to the flow of our human history. This is an invitation to the water, where marvellous things wait an inch below the surface.

Previously published as The Sea is Not Made of Water.

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf, 1927

This simple and haunting story captures the transcience of life and its surrounding emotions.

To the Lighthouse is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf’s novels. It is based on her own early experiences, and while it touches on childhood and children’s perceptions and desires, it is at its most trenchant when exploring adult relationships, marriage and the changing class-structure in the period spanning the Great War.

Divisible by Itself and One: Kae Tempest

Kae Tempest, 2023

Divisible by Itself and One is the powerful new collection from our foremost truth-teller Kae Tempest. Ruminative, wise, with a newer, more contemplative and metaphysical note running through, it is a book engaged with the big questions and the emotional states in which we live and create. Some of the poems experiment with form, some are free, and yet all are politically and morally conscious. Divisible by Itself and One is also a book about human form, the body as boundary and how we are read by the world. Taking its bearings – and title – from the prime number, Divisible by Itself and One is concerned, ultimately, with integrity: how to live in honest relationship with oneself and others.

Gap Gardening: Selected Poems

Rosmarie Waldrop, 2016

Gap Gardening “spans forty years of exploring the language I breathe and move in and that continues to condition me even while I try to contribute to it. It tracks my turn from verse to prose poems, to focusing on the sentence and its boundaries, my increasing reliance on collage and source texts as a way of engaging with other voices, of being in dialogue.”

Gap Gardening also traces Waldrop’s growing sense of writing as an exploration of what happens in between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures. Between fragment and flow, thinking and feeling, mind and body. For the first time, we have a complete and clear view of the work of a great and inquiring, brave and indispensable poet.

Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory

Lucy R. Lippard, 1995

Back in print, Overlay is Lucy Lippard’s classic book on contemporary art and its connection to prehistoric sites and symbols. Viewed by critics, artists, art historians, and students as the essential text on how prehistoric images have been “overlayed” onto contemporary art by today’s artists, Overlay is for anyone interested in the possibility of reintegrating art into the fabric of society as a whole, as in prehistoric times.

From megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge to Richard Long’s minimalism, from the earliest examples of cave drawings to Ana Mendieta’s Cuban site art, from the matriarchal fertility rituals of the ancient Celts to Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, Lippard shows a continuum in the forms, materials, symbols, and imagery that artists have employed for thousands of years.

Lavishly illustrated with over 320 black-and-white photographs and 8 pages of color images, Overlay includes the work of artists Carl Andre, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Charles Simonds, Mary Beth Edelson, Anna Sofaer, Michelle Stuart, Sol LeWitt, Ad Reinhardt, Alice Aycock, Nancy Holt, Emily Carr, Dennis Oppenheim, and many others.

Lee Lozano – Not Working

Jo Applin, 2018

This is the first in‑depth study of the idiosyncratic ten‑year career of Lee Lozano (1930–1999), assuring this important artist a key place in histories of post‑war art. The book charts the entirety of Lozano’s production in 1960s New York, from her raucous drawings and paintings depicting broken tools, genitalia, and other body parts to the final exhibition of her spectacular series of abstract “Wave Paintings” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970.

Highly regarded at the time, Lozano is now perhaps best known for Dropout Piece (1970), a conceptual artwork and dramatic gesture with which she quit the art world. Shortly afterwards she announced she would have no further contact with other women. Her “dropout” and “boycott of women” lasted until her death, by which time she was all but forgotten. This book tackles head‑on the challenges that Lozano poses to art history―and especially to feminist art history―attending to her failures as well as her successes, and arguing that through dead ends and impasses she struggled to forge an alternative mode of living. Lee Lozano: Not Working looks for the means to think about complex figures like Lozano whose radical, politically ambiguous gestures test our assumptions about feminism and the “right way” to live and work.

Lee Lozano: Private Book 1

Lee Lozano, 2019

Before her self-imposed exile from the art world, Lee Lozano (1930–99) was a highly regarded painter who defined a generation of American artists infusing conceptualism with a new intensity. A prolific writer and documenter of both her art and her relationships, the public and private, Lozano kept a series of personal journals from 1968 to 1972 while living in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. In the decade before her infamous “dropout piece”―culminating in a move to Dallas where she would remain until her death―Lozano returned to these notebooks, editing the entries, sometimes blacking out entire pages.

Private Book 1 is the first in the series of 11 pocket-sized books, which are printed as facsimiles.

Modern Nature: Journals, 1989 – 1990 (The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1)

Derek Jarman, Olivia Laing, 2018

In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness.

Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness.

Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life: his childhood, his time as a young gay man in the 1960s, his renowned career as an artist, writer and film-maker. It is at once a lament for a lost generation, an unabashed celebration of gay sexuality, and a devotion to all that is living.

The Apple is Everything

Barnaby Barford, 2022

A provocative new photobook from sculptor and artist Barnaby Barford
Explores the significance of the apple throughout human history
Over 240 illustrations and photographs of apples, illustrating their place within culture

The Apple: A Delicious History

Sally Coulthard, 2024

Sin, cider and apple crumble. the 10,000-year story of the world’s most tempting fruit.

The Apple: A Delicious History takes the reader on an extraordinary journey, from the apple’s prehistoric beginnings in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan to the explosion of commercial apple-growing in twenty-first-century China. Zigzagging across the centuries and straddling the globe, Sally Coulthard explores how the apple travelled along the Silk Road from Central Asia to Europe, appearing as an erotically charged symbol in Greek myth and poetry and even featuring in the shopping list of a senior Roman officer stationed on Hadrian’s Wall. She samples the cider that flowed from the emperor. Charlemagne’s orchards in the early Middle Ages, and relishes the crispness of the yellow sweeting, the first new apple variety to be cultivated in seventeenth-century America. And she discovers why, despite the existence of more than 7500 varieties of apple – from the ubiquitous Granny Smith to the purple-skinned Black Diamond of Tibet – only a handful of cultivars are available in modern supermarkets.

Odd Apples

A.A. Trabucco-Campos (Designer), William Mulan (Photographer), 2021

Upon closer inspection, inconspicuous things that are frequently taken for granted tend to reveal a whole universe of fascinating details and unusual features. You just have to have the right eye for them. This is absolutely the case with William Mullan. His encounter with the varying appearances of an Egremont Russet apple gave him a taste for it. Since then, he has explored the vast range of apple varieties, capturing their individual charms in loving, stylishly elegant portraits. It is precisely this odd charm combined with the hitherto unknown that make these photographs fascinating studies of a supposedly commonplace fruit. Mullan confides completely in their idiosyncratic aesthetics and invites us in this attractive gift book to embark on a visual expedition into the world of the apple.

In Land: Writings around Land Art and its Legacies

Ben Tufnell, 2019

An attempt to melt an iceberg with a blowtorch, an indoor lake of tequila, an ascent of Mt Everest, driftwood burnt with sunlight focused through a magnifying glass and a doorbell that emits the sound of a dying star; these are some of the extraordinary artistic strategies covered in this collection. Gathering together texts published since 2002, as well as specially written new essays, In Land traces recent engagements with landscape, nature, environment and the cosmos.