Helen Chadwick (18 May 1953 – 15 March 1996) was a British sculptor, photographer and installation artist. In 1987, she became one of the first women artists to be nominated for the Turner Prize. Chadwick was known for "challenging stereotypical perceptions of the body in elegant yet unconventional forms. Her work draws from a range of sources, from myths to science, grappling with a plethora of unconventional, visceral materials that included chocolate, lambs' tongues and rotting vegetable matter. Her skilled use of traditional fabrication methods and sophisticated technologies transform these unusual materials into complex installations". Maureen Paley noted that "Helen was always talking about craftsmanship—a constant fount of information". Binary opposition was a strong theme in Chadwick's work; seductive/repulsive, male/female, organic/man-made. Her combinations "emphasise yet simultaneously dissolve the contrasts between them". Her gender representations forge a sense of ambiguity and a disquieting sexuality blurring the boundaries of ourselves as singular and stable beings." They moved to live in Croydon in 1946, where Chadwick was born. Her degree show Domestic Sanitation (1976) consisted of her and three other women, 'wearing' latex costumes painted directly on to the skin, For her MA degree she created In the Kitchen (1977) in which she and three other female performers dressed in costumes that Chadwick had made by covering metal frameworks in PVC. The costumes represented gendered kitchen appliances, such as an oven in which the cooking rings resemble a breastplate. Also that year, she and two dozen other artists moved into Beck Road, Hackney, a double strip of Victorian terraces that was earmarked for demolition. After squatting for two years they persuaded the Inner London Education Authority to rent out, rather than demolish, the houses. Beck Road became a hive of home studios whose residents included Maureen Paley, Ray Walker and Genesis P-Orridge.
Chadwick's work really came to prominence with Of Mutability (1984-86), a large installation involving sculpture and photography at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
In 1990 Chadwick was invited to exhibit in a photography festival in Houston, Texas, where she met a local artist, David Notarius. The following year he moved to Beck Road and they married.
In the summer of 1994, Chadwick's exhibition Effluvia opened at the Serpentine, London. This exhibition marked the high point of Chadwick's exposure, receiving widespread critical attention and national press coverage. The exhibition was seen by 54,000 visitors, breaking the record for the gallery. In 1995, Chadwick received her first solo exhibition in the United States at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, entitled Helen Chadwick: Bad Blooms. In 1995, Chadwick took up an artist residency in the assisted conception unit at King's College Hospital, London, photographing IVF embryos rejected for implantation. She used the photos in Unnatural Selection, a series on which she was working when she died. Chadwick's work is included in the collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Tate and the Museum of Modern Art.
Gender representation
Chadwick's earlier work utilised her naked form, questioning the representation of the female body and addressing what Chadwick called "the issue of the female body as a site of desire".
Many critics, including former feminist colleagues, concluded that she reinforced the stereotypes she sought to subvert. As was the case for other women artists that were reclaiming their bodies through their art practice, she was accused of regressive female narcissism. Chadwick elaborated her interest in deconstructing gender binaries in a lecture she gave in 1991: "in language dual structures are defined as oppositional: where we have self, there must be other; gender is male or female, and most problematic and absurd of all is the split between mind and body" The work comprises ten plywood sculptures that reflect the mass of the artist's body at a succession of ages from premature birth to maturity at 30. Each sculpture takes the form of an object that symbolises that age, for example an incubator or a pram. The artist in her notebooks described the forms as "objects that a) contained me b) (re)oriented me c) moulded / shaped me".
Piss Flowers (1991–1992)
thumb|Helen Chadwick, Piss Flowers
Piss Flowers is a work made up of twelve sculptures that Chadwick made while on a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada, in February 1991. Chadwick describes the flowers as a "metaphysical conceit for the union of two people expressing themselves bodily".
The use of a flower as the form was significant for Chadwick because they are the bisexual reproductive organs of plants containing both male and female sex organs. The woman's urine flow is strong and hot, resulting in a central penile form; the man's is diffuse and cooler, and creates the labial circumference. Although they declared no proof, pathologists suggested a link between her heart attack and a viral infection causing a myocarditis – an inflammation of the heart muscle that could have been triggered anywhere between the last few years of her life and the last weeks.
Chadwick's impact on the British art scene as an artist and teacher helped pave the way for the Young British Artist (YBA) generation. Her expanded use of materials can be seen carried through the work of many these artists. Without Chadwick's Cacao, for example, it is impossible to imagine Anya Gallaccio's chocolate and flower installations. Since Chadwick's Barbican-organised retrospective, the full measure of her contribution to the trajectory of contemporary British art is starting to be realised. Works From The Estate (2013) marked what would have been her 60th birthday, showing some of Chadwick's most famous works. The following year Bad Blooms (2014) exhibited Chadwick's Wreaths of Pleasure (1992–93).
Tate Modern showed a retrospective of Chadwick's work from late September 2024 until June 2025.