Who Was Helen Chadwick, and Why Was She So Important?

Helen Chadwick was obsessed with the restless, fleeting vestiges of things and feelings that had vanished—what she called “fugitive traces.” Her huge breadth of multimedia installations bloomed out of the effort to examine the ephemera of life. “Chadwick is capturing the fugitive not in a spirit of grief or censure, but in celebration,” her friend Marina Warner wrote in a 1989 essay. Chadwick is now the subject of the largest-ever retrospective of her career, at the Hepworth Wakefield gallery in West Yorkshire, and a new biography edited by Laura Smith; her legacy continues to evolve in conversation with our current discourse on femininity.

“I genuinely don’t think contemporary art in Britain would look the same without her,” Smith told me. “The boldness with which she used her own body as a material, and used humor, was really revolutionary.” Her diverse works, from furry sculptures to photographs dunked in the sea to piles of decaying food, are hugely ambitious in their scope. It feels as if there are endless layers of meaning to peel back as she walks a blurry line between the beautiful and the grotesque.

Chadwick (1953–96) was born in Croydon, South London, into a working-class, mixed-heritage family. She studied at Brighton Polytechnic and the Chelsea College of Art in the 1970s before settling into a studio practice in Hackney, where she was a founding resident of the prolifically creative squatting community at Beck Road. Although her work would incorporate many materials (from urine to brains), she was trained as a photographer and continued to rely on the tool of the photographic image throughout her career.

Her early work In the Kitchen (1977) was recently included in the pioneering Tate Britain exhibition “Women in Revolt!” (2024). A performance in which Chadwick and three other women occupied costumes-cum-sculptures of kitchen appliances, now recorded in photographs, it was “a key moment in British feminist art practice,” according to the exhibition’s catalog. Still, Chadwick regularly was disparaged by both feminists and their critics for using her own conventionally beautiful body in her work, a criticism that shadowed her throughout her career.

Her key large-scale installations, like Ego Geometria Sum (1983) and The Oval Court (1986), are a dizzying blend of micro and macro views of human life, so layered and conceptual that they’re almost impossible to describe, but I’ll try. Ego Geometria Sum is a series of 10 plywood sculptures with photographs printed on their surfaces, encapsulating Chadwick’s whole life in geometric form. She described it as “a narrative of material objects, equivalents for selfhood, within a bounded safe place.” Each sculpture matches the volume of her body at different ages, beginning with a small rectangular prism representing an infant incubator and growing to her adult size.

The Oval Court is even more complex, made up of a series of blue-toned photocopied images of the artist’s naked body among various flora and fauna, arranged to form a sort of pool in the center of the room it occupies, topped by five golden spheres. On the walls are images inspired by the baldacchino in St. Peter’s Basilica, Venetian mirrors, and photocopied images of the artist weeping.

Both of these works utilize cheap materials to make vast statements about the mutability of self, the history of Western art, and the universality of life. They can be read in minute detail—Smith tells me that the hand gestures in The Oval Court are all drawn from specific Greek and Roman mythological references—but they also have a universal beauty and the fundamental magnetism of a self-portrait. By using the specificity of her own body and biography to reflect on these huge themes, Chadwick seems to be holding her arms out wide and attempting to enfold the world in her embrace. Her selfhood becomes the vector through which we see the universe.

By the late 1980s, Chadwick had vowed to stop using images of her body in her art, leading her toward works like Piss Flowers (1991–92),a group of white sculptures that are the results of the marks made by Chadwick and her husband, David Notarius, urinating on mounds of snow. They poured plaster into the holes bored by their urine, freezing them into strange landscapes. Works like this are still about the physicality of bodies but no longer depicting them. Even works like Cacao (1994), which opens the Hepworth exhibition, are about the body: A huge, real chocolate fountain, bubbling away like a fairy-tale cauldron, it filled me with desire and disgust simultaneously. (My mouth literally watered, but after a few moments I felt nauseous.) “The point of her work is that it makes you feel weird,” Smith said.

As teacher at various art schools in Britain, including Goldsmiths, Central Saint Martins, and the Royal College of Art, Chadwick had a significant influence on the generation of artists that followed her. The group that became known as the Young British Artists (YBAs) trace her impact, particularly artists Sarah Lucas and Anya Gallaccio. Their play with gender, decay, unexpected materials, and multimedia installations is indebted to Chadwick’s legacy. In 1987 Chadwick became one of the first women to be nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, an early recognition of her exceptionally original work.

Chadwick died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 42 in 1996. One notice of her death in the Observer described her as “the most eminent woman artist of her generation”—both a high compliment and an annoyingly gendered one. But since her death, her name and work have become almost obscure, the price of being struck down in the midst of life and perhaps the consequence of the complexity of her work. “It might be said that she was an artist slightly out of her time,” wrote Stephen Walker in his 2013 book about Chadwick. One might also say that she was an artist out of time; her career lasted only 16 years, and there is a sense of unresolved business about her oeuvre.

Chadwick was a theoretical artist: Research led her in competing directions, which she tried to negotiate and reconcile in a way that was incredibly fruitful but also incomplete at the time of her death. “But our experience of her work is not theoretical,” says Ceri Lewis, curator of Tate Modern’s display “Artist Rooms: Helen Chadwick,” which travels to the National Galleries of Scotland in July. “It’s an embodied experience, engaging all our senses.”

Not all critics have been so kind. Tom Morton wrote a scathing review of the last retrospective of Chadwick’s work, at the Barbican Centre in London in 2004. “Chadwick’s work is, at best, a vivid souvenir of an art world long gone, and at worst a vaguely hysterical irrelevance,” he wrote in Frieze magazine. I quote this for two reasons: First, the remarkably sexist language is a reminder that feminist art is still not taken seriously—calling anything hysterical is a dog whistle for misogyny. Second, it points to the ways that Chadwick’s legacy is contested. There is a risk in novelty, which is that it becomes trite as soon as it has been done. But forgetting Chadwick’s perilous originality prevents us from recognizing the profundity of her work. “Her exploration of a more complex, fluid identity feels very current,” says Lewis.

The final work in the Hepworth exhibition is Carcass (1986), a rectangular plexiglass column filled with decaying food. It forms a sort of life cycle, with fresh-looking vegetables on top and compost that has almost become blackened soil on the bottom. Upon closer inspection, one sees that the piece is full of life: Bubbles rise up through the moisture that has gathered in the lower half as the rapid process of decay causes an effervescent fermentation. It is disgusting, but also hypnotic and remarkably beautiful. That perfect cocktail of pleasure and revulsion was Chadwick’s lifelong aim, and her bold pursuit of it continues to generate confronting, propulsive questions for viewers and artists alike.