Though Helen Chadwick is known primarily for her sculpture and photography, her experimentation with performance and various forms of technology, including video, slide and light projectors, computers, microscopes, and photocopiers, reflected her innovative integration of new media in contemporary art practice.
Read MoreFrom early on in her practice, Chadwick explored the body, gender, and identity, often basing her works on her own body, whether as subject or object. Subverting traditional representations of gender and the body, the artist navigated the boundaries between desire and repulsion, sensual and abject, organic and inorganic through a visceral, tactile sensibility. Her uninhibited, direct approach to art making saw her incorporate materials such as chocolate, rotting food, flowers, fur, flesh, and bodily fluids.
Piss Flowers (1991—1992) featured 12 lacquered-white bronze casts of snow that Chadwick and her partner had urinated on—the cavities forming phallic protrusions on flower shaped platforms. Cacao (1994), a large, bubbling chocolate fountain, spoke to desire, pleasure, and excess, while simultaneously exuding a nauseating vulgarity. Giving form to transgressive behaviours and taboo ideas, Chadwick proposes a new aesthetic of bodily existence and pleasure.
One of Chadwick's seminal works, The Oval Court (1986) was a multi-part installation comprised of collage and sculpture. The collage features 12 life-sized cyan photocopies of the artist's naked body amongst animals and plants, installed horizontally on a raised flat blue surface as though floating in a two-dimensional pool. Centred on the platform are five golden spheres; the facing wall presents another large-scale photo collage of Chadwick's photocopied weeping face atop five Corinthian columns.
The Oval Court reflects the artist's interest in the intersections of science and Biblical mythology, with earthly globes, the nude entwined with nature, and the figure 12 suggestive of the 12 gates to heaven. Historically underappreciated, this work is the subject of a book by Marina Warner, Helen Chadwick: The Oval Court (2022).
Chadwick is known for her photographic series Wreaths to Pleasure (1992—1993). Comprised of 13 round Cibachrome prints encased in colourful powder-coated steel frames, each 'wreath' fuses flowers with various viscous compounds in carefully arranged compositions. Bluebells, orchids, tulips, and dandelions float on the surface of hair gel, milk, tomato juice, antiseptic creams, window cleaner, and engine oil.
The circular format of each Wreath to Pleasure, combined with a close-up aerial view of the photographs, evokes a sense of looking down into a Petri dish, and generates pseudo-scientific associations. Inviting messy, manufactured substances of the modern world to join conventional objects of beauty, Chadwick presents sensual images that dissolve the polarities of the pure and toxic, clean and dirty, pleasure and discomfort.
