Stella Bottai: Pumpkins and squashes have appeared in some of your most iconic works, such as your giant leather sculptures in collaboration with LOEWE (2022), and your 2018 Tate Britain Commission, which transformed the Duveen Galleries into a series of white-tiled stages and podiums hosting a six-month performance of a single character, dressed in a colourful squash-like costume (developed in collaboration with the fashion designer Jonathan Anderson). I suppose these kinds of vegetables—pumpkins, squashes, cabbages too—are deeply rooted into the ground. The Squash dramaturgy at Tate Britain also celebrated some kind of attachment to surfaces. Can you talk about how your interest in Cucurbitaceae and Brassicaceae began, and how does the new piece in Aspen connect with those past projects?
Anthea Hamilton: Ah! This is interesting: the Latin naming. Let’s always foreground that these things exist without the Western stamp all over them. Those names distance the object from our human connections to them—intellectualizing, colonising them. What I love about vegetables is their resistance to that, even when modified through domestication and agriculture. They have their encoded, willful behaviour and we’re mere witness to it. We know their scale, weights, aromas.
I always hope to make accessible work and I assume we can all relate to vegetables—they’re truly pop in that sense. They enable everyone their own positioning: still life painting, gardens, Halloween, a personal, physical sensation of childhood like or dislike. Pumpkins and cabbages bowl me over with their lushness and architectures and their modalities of growth.
SB: This is not your first outdoor piece as such, but it is the first time you work with cast aluminum at this scale—and perhaps also the first time that you create a sculpture whose material somehow implies a sense of permanence through the elements (I am thinking about previous works you made outdoor, using scaffolding materials or moving image projections, both media that imply beginnings and ends). How did you approach the process of conceiving a work for the public space in Aspen, and how did you arrive at the idea of bringing time (and timelessness?) into it through the addition of a sundial component?
AH: I totally agree with your description of material choice. Materials for me are always syntatic or narrative before functional—often what follows is the pragmatic search of finding the intersection, applying my own inappropriate logic to the process. Commissioned works give me the opportunity to speak to practices I admire but might seem to lie outside of my own—the choice of aluminium is a love letter to Eduardo Paolozzi. Not as sexy as a Rodin; not as playful as a Calder; not as intellectual as Baghramian, not as macho as a Picasso plaster—there’s something equally meat’n’potatoes as fanciful to Paolozzi’s oeuvre I appreciate.
The notion, naming, of being a sculptor has always made me uncomfortable. I regard myself as an artist because I think it’s a stretch to think of myself as another kind of creative: too slow for fashion; not practical enough to be a designer etc., despite deeply believing in functionality almost as a means of forging a conversation with a viewer that makes clear I feel myself that engaging with art is framed as difficult and therefore can be. The drive to make the piece a sundial is to up-end any kind of cultural weight, both as cultural object but also creating a lightness to this hunk of metal. It’s responsive and submissive to the natural elements around it by being activated by the sun, becoming a tool rather than a statement. And also, what could it do in contrast to a whole museum it’s sat next to, or being at the foot of the mountains.
SB: Material is at the heart of your work—of course this is something one could say for many (all?) artists but I feel in your case there is a very specific way in which vision and physical touch are brought together in the process of creating images. Material is always present, either as the real thing—a readymade playing itself—or by way of reproduction, such as the brick pattern used across wallpaper and fabric for a suit, or the grid/checked motifs recurring in many of your environmental installations. I heard you say that “museums are materials at a bigger scale”—this certainly seems apt to describe the Aspen Art Museum’s Shigeru-Ban designed building.
AH: Absolutely everything is material to me, even that which doesn’t have a physical presence. My early practice existed as assemblage and as it expanded so did the framing of what could be included in an assemblage. It’s a non-hierarchical mode; it’s of no concern to me whether something is an original or reproduction—rather a physical quality of the experience of looking (visual absorption).
I was obsessed with the proposition of Shigeru-Ban’s materiality of the building. My first idea was to dress the whole museum in flowers, because I couldn’t help but see it as a stunning ikebana basket.
Concurrently with the preparations for Cauliflower Sundial I was developing a solo show at the Fondazione Memmo in Rome. I’d postponed the show there by 12 months because I was floored by the weight of history in that town; it flowed over out and through me in every way and I needed a minute to figure that out. The lynchpin work in the show was a desk covered with Rankaku, a precious Japanese lacquering technique using quail eggs normally applied to small items like netsuke or cigarette cases. I wanted to use the technique as a material, to use it all over a huge surface and create a “Pop” event. To manage the weight of the occasion and its site, I had to change parameters.
Bringing it back to Aspen…
SB: Your work Luke Perry, 2009, first introduced your likening of a cauliflower to a human brain. I was curious to ask you about this specific work, and why Luke Perry? More broadly, I would love to hear about your fascination with cinema’s “pretty boys.” I would also argue that food and its preparation play a big role in your imagination. Is it about cultural consumption, or fetishisation of content, or perhaps it is both?
AH: The cauliflower is cast in wax dyed black, a material endlessly capable of becoming fluid and reforming at a more casual way than metal is. I’d suggest it also offers the image of an afro, making a triple composite of a cauliflower, a brain and an afro. With Enlightenment thinking foregrounding the human brain as priority it draws the other two images produced into a game of rock, paper, scissors for supremacy—a drama playing out atop Luke Perry’s head. Why him? The image in the work is an actual poster from my teendom. At the time it was pure hormonal desire but being able to see at a critical distance I can recognise the role of the classically good looking male as a visual marker of power. Stemming from Augustus’ use of his self-portrait we have seen it through the ages in Michelangelo’s David, Kabuki actors as pin-ups of the Edo-Period when Japan itself was a lusted over, exoticised idea in the West, Elvis, The Beatles, the Reagan-era bratpack, sweaty Troye Sivan, divinely handsome A$AP Rocky, K-pop heroes, and the fluid rotation of “internet boyfriends.” Each of them intrinsically representative of what’s dominant in popular and political culture at each moment; war, gender fluidity and 1969, blackness, algorithms—via the most powerful communicator: print, TV, cinema, MTV, social media apps.
I regard consumption as the modus operandi; I was born in the late-70’s. I can’t think outside of it, fetishisation comes as a standard. To assert my wholesome love of vegetables often feels like a kink.
Anthea Hamilton: Cauliflower Sundial will be on view at the Aspen Art Museum Commons through July 25, 2026.