The Art of Helen Chadwick TV - Helen Chadwick - Tate online -
Helen Chadwick died in 1996 at the age of 42. The Art of Helen Chadwick
3 Experiments With Video; Train of Thought 1979; Ego Geometria Sum 1984-1986; The Oval Court 1984-86; Carcass 1986; Mirror 1984; Blood Hyphen 1988; Viral Landscape No 5 1988-8; Meat Abstract No 8 1989; Fleshlings No 1 1989; Piss Flowers 1991-92; Cacao 1994; Nebula 1996; Moonstance 1996. ibid.
I felt more and more alienated from my own sense of self. Helen Chadwick
Drink me harder, my delight.
Swirl to bursting pretty sluice
And piss a posey deeper, dear.
Here into my snow white rain
Rode about my pistol shot.
Hot juice, as if a bumble bee,
Would lick my petal.
Pollinate me, for center stage
The golden crown … Helen Chadwick
Right from early art school, I wanted to use the body to create a sense of inner relationships with the audience. Helen Chadwick
English sculptor, photographer and installation artist. She studied at Brighton Polytechnic (1973–6) and the Chelsea School of Art, London (1976–7). She lived and worked in London, and lectured at the Royal College of Art, Chelsea School of Art and the London Institute. Chadwick’s innovative and provocative use of a rich variety of materials, such as flesh, flowers, chocolate and fur, was hugely influential on a younger generation of British artists. Her strongly associative and visceral images were intended to question gender representation and the nature of desire. This theme was continued in Model Institution (1981), an ‘architectural-sculpture’ of five drab booths as would be found in a Social Security office, intended to reflect on the high unemployment and economic frustrations of the time. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s her work became richer and more direct in impact. A fountain of thick chocolate called Cacao carried associations both of excessive physical desire and pleasure, at the same time being base and nauseating. Desire and repulsion also converged in Piss Flowers (bronze, cellulose lacquer, 12 parts, 1991–2; various private colleges, see exhibition catalogue 1994), in which casts were made of cavities produced by urinating in snow. Evoking the infantilism and use of chance by the Dadaists, as well as the provocative and politicised work of contemporary artists such as Andrés Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, Piss Flowers represent transgressive behaviour as equally beautiful and disgusting. Chadwick was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1987. Tate online