Why Helen Chadwick’s earthy, provocative art remains as vital as ever – The Art Newspaper

Nearly 30 years after Helen Chadwick’s unexpected death on 15 March 1996, aged 42, her work has never felt more fresh and relevant. Decades before the word achieved its current currency, a profound sense of fluidity characterised her sexy, erudite and gorgeously irreverent output.

Helen was exploring selfhood and identity long before identity politics was widely foregrounded, and doing so in a way that celebrated all that is sensuous, across gender and species. Whether casting male and female “piss holes” in the snow, entwining blonde hair with pig’s intestines, combining flower petals with cleaning fluids or fabricating a fountain of molten chocolate, her art played with taboos, clichés, ideas of femininity and artistic conventions to interrogate who and what we are. 

I will never forget Helen’s landmark 1986 exhibition Of Mutability at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), which won her immediate notoriety and a Turner Prize nomination—making her one of the first women artists to be shortlisted. I had never seen anything like the installation The Oval Court, comprising 12 near-life-size photocopies of a naked female form—which I later learned was Chadwick’s—cavorting against an ultramarine background among a throng of beasts, plants and foodstuffs.

Presiding over the show was Carcass, a ceiling-high glass tower filled with layers of pungent rotting organic waste. Luckily I saw the show just before Carcass unexpectedly exploded, spreading stinking, fermenting waste throughout the space and necessitating its removal.

From cerebral to profane

A couple of years later I did the first of what were to be many interviews with Helen to coincide with the launch of her 1989 Meat Lamp series, a disquieting series of lightboxes which exquisitely mingled images of meat and offal with other materials. It included a lightbulb nestling in fleshy folds of red meat, entrails mingled with human hair and a giant human ear, echoed by a Rococo curlicue that was nursing a sphere of light. Other artists were also playing with architectural ornamentation at the time but no one I encountered was mashing up nature and culture in such a lush, transgressively visceral way.

Around this time we also became friends. Once I stopped being daunted by Helen’s fierce intelligence we bonded over a shared love of the bawdy and having a good time. Rather like so much of her art, under an immaculately presented exterior Helen was earthy and sexy—and I loved how she could ricochet from the cerebral to the profane in half a sentence.

It wasn’t just me who saw how exceptional she was. Alongside her art practice, Helen was also a hugely popular and inspirational teacher. Whether at the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths, Chelsea or Central St Martins, she made a huge impact on the next generation of artists—most notably the likes of Tracey Emin, Anya Gallaccio, Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst—giving them licence to be funny and outrageous, to use visceral and domestic materials and to make mischievous mockery of macho minimalism. “Her most direct influence on me was her use of unconventional materials,” says Gallaccio. “Her work presented the actually stuff of a body, making visible the mutability of life.”

Yet this playful provocativeness and determined taboo-busting did not endear Helen to many of the alpha-male gatekeepers of the art establishment, and only now is she getting the full recognition she deserves. Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures at Hepworth Wakefield is her first retrospective for more than 25 years, spanning two decades of work in an appropriately full-throttle meltdown of sights, sounds and smells. She would have loved that it is being held in a museum devoted to another pioneering female artist, Barbara Hepworth.

The show opens with the giant 1994 bubbling, farting fountain Cacao, and for the first time all the elements of Of Mutability are now reunited, with Carcass filled with bubbling, fermenting waste gathered from the Hepworth’s café. Life Pleasures also offers a rare sighting of the early meticulously stitched hairy armpit and female pudenda “body cushion” sculptures from 1973, along with work from Helen’s 1977 Chelsea College degree show In the Kitchen (1977) where she performed wearing sculptural “white goods” costumes.

Other key pieces include the series of Viral Landscapes made in 1988-89 in response to HIV and Aids. Helen employed what was then cutting-edge medical technology to overlay scans of her own intimately harvested microscopic cells across images of the rugged Pembrokeshire coastline. In doing so, she highlighted the porousness of boundaries, whether physical, political or geographic.

Then there are the painted bronze Piss Flowers (1991-92), arguably her most famous works. These 12 sculptures were made by Helen and her husband David Notarius, during a residency in Banff in Canada, the trio taking turns to urinate into densely packed snow and then pour liquid plaster into the cavities, which were cast in bronze and enamelled white. The result was a strange garden of hermaphrodite blooms, with the steady stream of female urine creating a craggy erect stamen and the male sprinklings a series of flowery corollas. It was a sexual congress made manifest in bronze—Helen called the work her “penis envy farce”.

Another edition of Piss Flowers formed the centrepiece of the Artist Rooms devoted to her work at London’s Tate Modern. This was the first substantial manifestation of her work to be shown by Tate and the display is now touring to National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One in Edinburgh, where it will be on view for a year from 12 July. Also included are Nebula and Monstrance (both 1996), from Unnatural Selection, the last series Helen completed before her death. These were initiated by a residency at the Assisted Conception Unit at King’s College Hospital in London, where she photographed the crystalline cell structures of laboratory-generated embryos that had been rejected as unfit for implantation.

The sculptures take the form of 19th-century mourning jewellery, with the embryo cell images interspersed with photographs of other organic matter including a cataracted human eye. These poignant last works would have provided a fitting finale to the grand gathering of work at the Hepworth, so what a shame that Tate declined to lend them. Nonetheless these two long overdue shows of Helen Chadwick still confirm what a crucial presence she was, and still is.

• Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures, Hepworth Wakefield, until 27 October