For some artists a com­mis­sion to craft Christmas lights might be taken as an op­por­tun­ity to have a bit of fun, adding a dose of kitsch to their catalogue raisonné, or at­tem­pt­ing an unsubtly sub­ver­s­ive satire of the com­mer­ci­ally-driven season.

Not so Anya Gallaccio. When the Paisley-born Turner Prize nominee was asked to provide festive lighting for The Hayward gallery, she took to the project like any other show or com­mis­sion, coming up with an in­stal­l­a­tion that fits in with her past practice, and rests on themes that have run through her work since she rose to fame in the late 90s alongside the Young British Artists launched at the now-infamous Freeze ex­hib­i­tion curated by Damien Hirst.

‘I did struggle,’ Gallaccio admits, ‘And it was quite hard to come up with something that took the same approach as I would for any project. The thing that took a long time to get over was the idea that Christmas lights are usually very graphic - a snowman, a star, a flower - and I didn’t want to make images like that. I ended up trying to think more about the process, about light itself and what you can do with it, and about colour.’

The result, a set of lights at the South Bank switched on last night by model-cum-author Sophie Dahl, consists of hundreds of coloured light­bul­bs festooned on two sides of the Thames-side building.

‘I’ve made a big grid of green lights on the right hand side of the building,’ Gallaccio explains, ‘We hand-dipped about a thousand different light bulbs in different shades of green, using French enamel varnish, to make a sort of colour field. Then, on the other side of the building, there’s a smaller version made up of about 900 red bulbs.’

Aside from their Christ­massy con­not­a­tions, those colours are familiar from one of Gallaccio’s best known in­stal­l­a­tions, Red on Green, which saw ten thousand rose heads laid out on a bed of their stalks, and left to slowly rot away. Light­bul­bs do not, of course, decay, but Gallaccio has come up with novel way of in­cor­por­at­ing her long-standing interest in tran­s­form­a­tions over time.

‘Each bulb in the piece has a computer chip,’ she says, ‘so that I can have each one to turn on and off when I want it to, and we’ve pro­gram­med the festoons of lights with Christmas carols and songs - Frosty The Snowman, White Christmas, that sort of thing - in Morse code. You can’t read the Morse code, but I needed a way of de­ter­m­in­ing how the lights would come on and off without involving an image. If you think back to the roses, there were ten thousand flowers, all a similar red, but there was an optic effect down to the nature of the pigment in the blooms which changed as they aged. For this piece, I decided to hand-dip the bulbs in colours that range from yellowy-green to very dark shade, so there’s this slightly intuitive, organic element to it.’

Another key aspect of Gallaccio’s practice is her re­luct­ance to show her hand, so to speak, pre­fer­ring im­per­man­ent in­stal­l­a­tions that are left to their own devices, from rotting flower heads to chocolate smeared on gallery walls or the vast block of ice she left to melt away in a disused Wapping pumping station. More recently, the artist has reclaimed the rather naff art of macramé, la­bor­i­ously knotting great swathes of netting that are then hung and draped to un­der­mined their rigid grid-like structure.

Again, Gallaccio’s festive lights have been made with her wider practice in mind, taking advantage of The Hayward’s plans for their annual lightshow. ‘The idea of the programme is that it will become an ac­cu­mu­lat­ive project,’ she says, ‘This year, they’re in­stal­ling the lights David Batchelor made last year again, and next year there’ll be somebody else and my lights will go up again - after a while the building will end up looking like a family Christmas tree, with a great jumble of stuff built up over the years!’

‘So, I’ve left open lots of pos­s­ib­il­it­ies to do different things with the piece. Next year, the bulbs could be placed more closely together, which would make the colours more intense, or it could be hung in a com­p­letely different formation. I’m looking forward to seeing what different things those colours do in different places and on different scales around the South Bank in the coming years.’

Gallaccio’s con­tri­bu­tion to London’s seasonal cityscape is not alone: over at Tate Britain, Fiona Banner has installed a 30-foot Nordic tree, and decorated it with models of the world’s fighter aircraft shorn of their national markings, iron­ic­ally dubbing the tree Peace On Earth. With The Hayward’s com­mit­ment to future lighting projects, this looks like the start of a trend, one that other cities would do well to follow, tempering those gaudy municipal rigs with con­tri­bu­tions from artists. There’s even an obvious slogan: ‘Tis the season to be arty.

This interview was first published in The Herald in December, 2007.