Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures

The exhibition begins with melted chocolate. A big pool of it. Not the silky-smooth, oil-infused sort into which you might dip a strawberry at a wedding, but just chocolate – viscous and swampy, as alluring as it is scatological. This three-metre-wide installation, titled Cacao FIG.1, opens Life Pleasures, a large-scale retrospective of the work of Helen Chadwick (1953–96) at the Hepworth Wakefield. The qualities embodied in the work – its fluidity and instability – are indicative of the exhibition it introduces, while also serving as a fitting parallel to Chadwick’s wider practice, which the show’s curator, Laura Smith, describes as ‘mischievously unruly and luxuriously disruptive’ (p.14).¹

Chadwick was a prolific artist. The exhibition brings together over 160 objects from her short career, which was curtailed when she died of a heart attack aged just forty-two. These range from early textile costumes, sewn sculptures and videos made during her Master’s degree at Chelsea College of Art, London – such as the domestic-appliance-inspired In the Kitchen (1977) and the meticulous knitted (and bloody) tampon series Knitted Lillet Blood Cycle FIG.2 – to later sculpture and photography, as well as a selection of maquettes, notes and sketches. Chadwick’s ideas about gender, sexuality and the body are expressed in a wide and experimental array of media, all handled with enormous skill.

One of the most striking works is the ten-part series Ego Geometria Sum FIG.3, in which photographs of Chadwick’s naked body are exposed directly onto plywood structures to eerie effect. Each sculpture depicts a milestone in the artist’s life, her face obscured as she contorts her body to match the scaled dimensions of the object it is projected onto. From the tiny, transparent incubator in which Chadwick spent time as a new-born (Ego Geometria Sum I: Incubator – Birth) to her school gymnastics horse, overlaid with the columns of the Parthenon (Ego Geometria Sum VIII: The Horse – Age 11 Years), these incrementally larger works are not only evocatively autobiographical, but also speak to a more Classical understanding of the body as form, sculpture and geometry. The softness of flesh and ethereality of memory are rendered apparently solid. The work also draws on collective experience, incorporating other symbols, such as a troll toy and a child’s shoe. This work, more quietly reflective than some of the others presented, demands the viewer’s attention nevertheless. The sculptures are set against sumptuous pink curtains and the photographic series The Labours (1983–84), in which Chadwick physically interacts with Ego Geometria Sum, further complicating image and object and layering surface upon surface.

Nearby, The Oval Court FIG.4 also features Chadwick’s naked form. A low plinth is covered with cyan-and-white photocopies of the artist’s body, twisted as though floating or swimming through blue space: in fishnets or a hood, double-faced, multi-armed, reaching, searching. Five gold spheres are balanced on top. Each composition is filled with narrative, expression and movement, an effect she achieved by layering a plethora of other objects directly onto the glass of the Xerox machine, selected in the tradition of vanitas: ribbons, fruit, flowers, a dead lamb, goose and rabbits. The work extends Chadwick’s examination of mutability and the transformational potential of Classical subjects, and indeed, her own Greek heritage – her mother was a refugee from Athens – all realised through a vision that is idiosyncratic and highly personal. 

Towards the end of the 1980s Chadwick shifted away from the indexical use of her own external, naked body – for which she received criticism, especially from feminist circles – and began to turn inwards. ‘I didn’t know how I could depict my body without being female’, she reflected in a 1996 interview. ‘It was at this point that I thought if I use the cells of my body, my interior self, then this would be read as “human”’.² This is evident in Viral Landscapes, a series in which photomicrographs of cells from her blood, cervix, ear, urine and mouth are abstracted and overlaid across views of the Pembrokeshire coastline. Chadwick first printed these rural photographs onto large, horizontal canvases, which she then submerged in the sea, allowing the force of the waves to shape the image. These were subsequently rephotographed, and it was onto these final images that the artist printed her cellular forms, merging the body’s interior with the body of the landscape.³ As Smith notes, Viral Landscapes makes anxiety palpable by presenting the human body as vulnerable and permeable, with frontiers that can be transgressed.⁴ Made during the torment of the AIDS crisis, these vast works continue to resonate with the extraordinary capacities and catastrophic failures of the human body.

Chadwick’s twelve-part Piss Flowers FIG.5 is undoubtedly her most well-known work. Made in collaboration with her husband, the artist David Notarius, its forms were created by urinating into densely compacted snow through a large, flower-shaped metal stencil. Chadwick squatted close to the snow’s surface, producing a hotter, more direct stream that melted a deeper, central cavity, creating the sculptures’ phallic-like stamens. Notarius, on the other hand, stood, resulting in a cooler, more diffuse spray around the edges. Playful and irreverent, Piss Flowers marks the early period of her relationship with Notarius and combines the beauty of natural and botanical forms with the darker, more visceral realities of organic life cycles. On this work, Chadwick remarked, ‘I want to catch the body at the moment when it’s about to turn. Before it starts to decay, to empty’.⁵

Flowers – forms perpetually burdened with symbolism – are also integral to Wreaths to Pleasure (1992–93), a series of thirteen circular Cibachrome prints in coloured frames. Tulips, daisies, bluebells and other floral arrangements are photographed floating in dense liquids, such as jam, milk, Swarfega, Windolene and Germolene. At times, they are accompanied by unexpected objects named in the work title – for example Wreath to Pleasure, No. 8 (Gerberas, Fur, Lard) – transforming the seductive glossiness of the surface into something vaguely unpleasant and disquieting. More directly provocative and abject are the Meat Abstract (1989) photographs and Loop my Loop FIG.6, which return to the theme of vanitas in visceral still lifes composed with cuts of raw meat.

The exhibition concludes with Carcass FIG.7 – one of the most elemental and perhaps prescient works in this considered presentation. It consists of a tall glass vitrine filled with waste food materials, here sourced from the gallery café. Famously, when the work was installed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in her 1986 exhibition Of Mutability, it exploded as a result of trapped fermenting gases.⁶ Carcass combines the visual beauty of food in its top layers – in particular the vibrant pinks and greens of slightly spoiled rhubarb – with a reminder of the active processes of decay below in a three-dimensional memento mori. Indeed, as Louisa Buck poignantly observes in the extensive accompanying publication, ‘All [Chadwick’s] work was about the fact that life is but a transient bubble, we are meat, we will rot; our intellect lights us up, but in the end we all vanish’ (p.230).