How Anya Gallaccio’s memorial will look

A TREE felled in its prime is the inspiration behind London’s first permanent memorial to people who contracted HIV and Aids.

The public art will be in Store Street, Bloomsbury, and the artist who has won the commission has been announced.

Anya Gallaccio is working with charity Aids Memory UK after being chosen from a shortlist of ideas.

Her work features a vertical circular ring you can walk through next to another circular ring that passers-by can rest on.

The site chosen is near Middlesex Hospital, once home to a trailblazing clinic offering help to people who had contracted HIV.

Ms Gallaccio is based both in London and San Diego, California, and this is her first permanent public work in London.

She said: “The proposal as it stands is holding space with the intention of providing a meeting place, a heart for community-generated events and oral histories… The tree is a symbol of life. The planes that line the street side of the crescent are everywhere in the city, for good reason, they withstand pollution. They are survivors, living, despite their environment, a clunky but perhaps fitting metaphor for those living with HIV and Aids. Hidden in plain sight.”

The charity describes the design as the “form of a felled tree… that will offer space for remembrance and solidarity”.
It will offer a space commemorating those affected by HIV/Aids in the past, present and the future.

Tony Tugnutt holding an alternative design

Ms Gallaccio’s proposal features a tree trunk whose core rings have been extracted and displayed upright. Ms Gallaccio works in organic materials and designs her work for the site they are earmarked for. She came to prominence as part of the Young British Artists movement, exhibiting with Damien Hirst in 1988 at the infamous Freeze show that coined the moniker YBA. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2003.

The project has been backed by a £130,000 grant from the Mayor of London and Ms Gallaccio was selected by a panel of judges made up of artists, doctors, writers, public servants and the charity trustees.

Curator Michael Morris, who was one of the judges, added: “Into the midst of a tree-lined crescent, Anya Gallaccio introduces a monumental trunk, its inner rings removed and standing upright close by.

“Such an expression of loss and resilience, and its constant presence through time, could not be clearer. The horizontal trunk and the vertical rings that watch over it powerfully and poignantly merge to memorialise the Aids crisis, creating a living place of remembrance both for the communities most directly affected by HIV and for all Londoners.”

The chosen design has not been universally welcomed and a long-standing, alternative plan organised by HIV survivor and campaigner Tony Tugnutt, who chaired the Bloomsbury conservation area advisory committee, was not considered.

He said: “We have waited many years for a public memorial and so it is vital this is done well, with respect, and is truly somewhere those of us who have survived, those of us who mourn the loss of loved ones, and any one wanting to remember what happened to those who contracted HIV, can feel a sense of peace.

“We drew up a design using the iconic red ribbon, which we felt would be appropriate, but our plan was not considered.

“I fear that anything ground-based, as this design is, might be ill used, can you imagine skateboarders using the circle?

“We need a memorial that will be designed in a way that it is not subject to vandalism or ill-used and I am not convinced this is it.”