The body according to Chadwick: with material ingenuity and anatomical candor, Helen Chadwick used photos, sculptures and ambitious installations to explore the physical basis of experience. A touring exhibition surveys this British artist's brief bright career

Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Lynn MacRitchie

The British artist Helen Chadwick was born prematurely in 1953 and died prematurely 43 years later. The first retrospective of her art, organized by London's Barbican Art Gallery, makes one thing clear: we lost not only her potential work but also an artist--perhaps the only artist--who effectively bridged the gap between the radical, politicized feminist art of the 1970s and the self-conscious, media-aware work of the British women artists who came to prominence in the mid-1990s. (1) Before Tracey Emin and her unmade bed there was Chadwick, forming sculpture with her own urine. Before Sam Taylor-Wood suspended herself from the studio ceiling for the camera there was Chadwick, naked, wrestling with photos of her own body. Fiercely ambitious, attractive and bold, Chadwick was the precursor of those groovy, artist girls who smile at us now from the party sections of glossy magazines, sign deals with fashion houses and take pictures of movie stars.

Like the YBAs, Chadwick was a media phenomenon. Her 1994 solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in London garnered extensive press coverage. Piss Flowers (1991-92), white-lacquered bronze casts of impressions made by Chadwick and her male partner urinating into deep snow, and Cacao (1994), a bubbling, odoriferous fountain of melted chocolate, were just the stuff to grab tabloid headlines. And the exposure got results. In 1995, Piss Flowers was included in the huge survey show "Feminin/Masculin, le sexe de Part" at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, installed next to work by Louise Bourgeois. Yet, no matter how apparently sensational her subject matter, Chadwick did not set out to play a media game of cat and mouse, which, at least in the U.K., may have become one of the obligations of a successful artist. She seems to have been impelled by a fierce inner drive to find ways of capturing the messy business of human existence in artworks of ever increasing inventiveness.

To make Ego Geometria Sum (I Am Geometry), 1983, her first mature piece, Chadwick subjected her early life in Croydon, a quiet outer suburb of London, to an almost forensic examination. Having made a comprehensive photographic record of her past--including shots of such objects as an incubator identical to the one she was placed in at birth and such locations as the various schools she attended--she then devised a way of combining the black-and-white pictures with sculpture. She made 10 differently shaped plywood objects, each meant to represent a stage in her life, then painted them with a light-sensitive coating and printed the photographs directly onto the wood surface. Naked, she impersonates herself first as a baby, then as a young girl, and develops object by object into the adult woman shown standing straight and confident on the final piece, a tall rectangular solid, which represents her London home. Around the sculptures are hung additional photographs, 10 gelatin silver prints dyed a peachy pink. Called "Ego Geometria Sum: The Labours" (1984), they show the artist, again naked, grappling in turn with each of the plywood forms, her trim body suggesting the youthful male athletes of Greek vase paintings. Chadwick had found the means, both literal and metaphorical, to make visible in art her very struggle to render' life itself.

Chadwick quickly became a respected artist at the heart of the London scene, teaching at Goldsmiths, Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. The installation The Oval Court (1984-86) seems to celebrate her life at that time. It pictures the nude artist cavorting with a cornucopia of animals, fish, fruit and flowers. The striking images are photocopies made by placing the objects (dead creatures, flora and her own body) directly on the glass plate of a photocopier loaded with blue ink. The results look like negatives, the photocopier's beam having captured the textures of fur, fruit, skin and fish scales as white shapes against a dense blue background. The photocopies are collaged onto a platform painted the same blue and raised from the floor on legs a few inches high. In the center of the platform, five gleaming golden spheres, arranged in a curved formation, seem like planets amid the constellation-like groupings of photocopies. On the surrounding walls are photocopied renderings of ornate twisted columns that evoke Bernini's monumental baldachin in St. Peter's--which is surmounted by a golden orb. The message seems clear enough: the artist, a woman at the height of her physical beauty and with supreme confidence in her creative powers, is free to play with all the bounty of the universe, arranged to suit her whim.

But Chadwick also included an image of her weeping face, multiplied and set atop clusters of photocopied foliage that connect the columns. And between two of the columns hangs a Venetian hand mirror, its glass frame augmented with a pair of crying eyes. Intended as a caveat, reminding viewers that life's beauty and pleasure are fleeting, all this did not stem a tide of criticism in the feminist press, which attacked Chadwick for using nude photographs here and in Vanity (1986), a large color shot of herself, naked to the waist and adorned with drapery and feathers, gazing into a large circular mirror in which The Oval Court is reflected.