Helen Chadwick

For the British musician and singer, see Helen Chadwick (musician).

Helen Chadwick
Helen Chadwick
Born	Helen Clare Chadwick (1953-05-18)18 May 1953 Surrey, England
Died	15 March 1996(1996-03-15) (aged 42) Camden, London, England
Nationality	British
Education	University of Brighton,
Known for	Conceptual art, installation art
Movement	Feminism

Helen Clare Chadwick (18 May 1953 – 15 March 1996) was an English conceptual artist.

Early life and education

Chadwick was born on May 18, 1953 in Croydon in London, England. She studied at Croydon College of Art, The Faculty of Arts and Architecture Brighton Polytechnic and then at the Chelsea School of Art.

Career

Beck Road, Hackney, where Chadwick lived

As a young artist, Chadwick lived in Beck Road, Hackney, where one of her first London friends was another resident of the street, Maureen Paley. Paley and other friends took part in Chadwick's first London show, a feminist performance entitled In the Kitchen, by strapping themselves in a canvas model of a cooker. Chadwick guided Paley in the conversion of her home into a space for art exhibitions. Paley said, "Helen was always talking about craftsmanship—a constant fount of information".

She has often been identified as a feminist, with several of her works addressing the role and image of woman in society, especially in her postgraduate days and alongside her colleague and friend Elaine Shemilt. Her work often reflected her sometimes uneasy relationship with her own body and her partner's body, using organic materials, such as meat, flowers and chocolate. She is perhaps most famous for Piss Flowers (1991–92), bronze sculptures cast from cavities made when urinating in the snow by both Chadwick and her husband David Notarius.

Earlier works include Viral Landscapes, a series of photographs from the late 1980s where blotches (actually magnified images of cells from her body) are superimposed over landscapes, and Meat Abstracts (1989) large photographs of meat juxtaposed with leather and fabric.

Right from early art school, I wanted to use the body to create a sense of inner relationships with the audience.

To look at her work in the context of art history it is interesting to see the differences between her approach to her own body and the way the female figure was used in the past.

"In Ego Geometria Sum: The labourers X" of 1984, she is attempting to use her body in a decorative or seductive way, attempting to lift a large box covered with a picture of her own body, she is literally struggling under the weight of her own image and self-importance, which was something perhaps doubly applicable to her as both a woman and an artist in the public eye.

Her largest and most complex work was a two-room installation at the ICA, London, in 1986. A catalogue was published with essays by Marina Warner and Richard Cork, with detailed photographs of parts of the installation. In the centre of one room was a large oval dais or low stage, covered with twelve life-sized images of Chadwick's own body, juxtaposed with animals, plants, objects, foodstuffs, etc. The images were composites made with blue A4 photocopies, made directly from her own body and from the various other objects. By using A4 size photocopies she was able to manipulate and subtly shift the images. Five golden spheres rested on the dais, corresponding to the finger placings of a huge imagined hand. A photograph can be found in this article: On the walls of this room were printouts of computer-rendered drawings of the Baroque columns from the baldacchino of St Peter's in Rome, photographic images of the face of the artist weeping, and an ornate mirror of Venetian glass. This room was named 'The Oval Court'. In the other room was a square glass column, about 4 ft wide, filled with decaying compost. This room was named 'Carcass'. The work was bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum under the name 'Of Mutability', but the medium is given as 'photocopy' alone. A documentary film about the making of the work was released in 1987 Chadwick was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987.

Whilst in her earlier work she questioned the role of the female body in art as a decorative object, just as decorative and aesthetic ideas about art themselves had been questioned in the 20th century, in the late 1980s she changed saying, "I made a conscious decision in 1988 not to represent my body. It immediately declares female gender and I wanted to be more deft."

Chadwick thereby abandoned this practice to become more visceral and moved inside the body to human flesh, and what is common to all of us but which we avoid thinking about. However, she did not abandon the themes of sexual identity and gender identity. Her Cibachrome transparencies of 1990 entitled "Eroticism" depict two brains side by side.

In 1995, Chadwick took up an artist residency in the assisted conception unit at King's College Hospital, London, photographing IVF embryos rejected for implantation. She used the photos in Unnatural Selection, a series on which she was working when she died.

Death

Chadwick died in 1996 in Camden, London from a viral infection that weakens the heart muscle, preventing it from pumping. The virus was contracted while she was working in a hospital..

Legacy

The first major retrospective of Chadwick's work was held in 2004 at the Barbican London before touring to Manchester, Denmark and Sweden. Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, held an exhibition opening May 2013 to mark what would have been her 60th birthday.

Bibliography

• Helen Chadwick, Mary Horlock (contributor), Eva Martischnig (contributor), Mark Sladen (editor) Helen Chadwick, Hatje Cantz Publishers (July 2004) ISBN 3-7757-1393-X
• N.P. James (Editor) Helen Chadwick CV Publications (September 1, 2005) ISBN 1-904727-45-X
• Helen Chadwick Enfleshings Aperture Book (November 1989) ISBN 0-89381-394-X
• Helen Chadwick Stilled Lives Portfolio Gallery (December 31, 1995) ISBN 0-9520608-3-3
• Of Mutability: Helen Chadwick (exhibition catalogue, London, ICA, 1986)
• Effluvia: Helen Chadwick (exhibition catalogue, essay M. Allthorpe-Guyton, London, Serpentine Gal., 1994)
• Rideal, Liz, Mirror Mirror: Self-portraits by women artists 2001 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 12 September 2001 – 20 January 2002), p. 101
• Rideal, Liz, Insights: Self Portrait 2005, p. 17
• Rachel Jones, "Helen Chadwick and the Logic of Dissimulation", in: Margret Grebowicz (ed.) Gender after Lyotard. NY: Suny, 2007.

External links

(some of these links are dead and need to be researched again)

• An audio interview with Chadwick from the BBC
• Helen Chadwick (BBC)
• The Guardian on Chadwick's self-portrait Vanitas II, Helen Chadwick (1986)
• The archive of Helen Chadwick is held in the Henry Moore Institute Archive – click on this link to search the archive catalogue
• Podcast: 'Viral Landscapes', Helen Chadwick
• Helen Chadwick (British Installation Artist, 1953–1996)
• [2] (The Art Fund)
• Helen Chadwick (Victoria and Albert Museum)
• Helen Chadwick (1953–1996) (The National Fine Art Education Digital Collection)
• Helen Chadwick (British Council)
• Turner Prize History – Artists: Helen Chadwick (Tate Britain)
• Helen Chadwick (Tate)
• Domestic Sanitation, Latex Glamour Rodeo
• Helen Chadwick (1953–1996), Artist (National Portrait Gallery)

Works

• BBC image gallery (22 works)
• Bad Blooms: Wreaths to Pleasure #11
• Eat Me
• Wreath to Pleasure No 1 & Wreath to Pleasure No 10
• Cibachrome Photograph – Vanity
• Screenprint – Allegory of Misrule
• Nostalgie de la Boue
• Meat Abstract, 1989 (i)
• Meat Abstract, 1989 (ii)
• Meat Abstract, 1989 (iii)
• Meat Abstract, 1989 (iv)
• Meat Abstract, 1989 (v)
• Meat Abstract # 4
• One Flesh, 1985
• One Flesh
• Of Mutability
• Piss Flowers
• Self-Portrait (National Galleries of Scotland)