Helen Chadwick

Her parents met during the Second World War in Athens, Greece, and moved to live in Croydon in 1946.

Helen Chadwick (18 May 1953 – 15 March 1996) was a British sculptor, photographer and installation artist.

Helen Chadwick was born on 18 May 1953 in Croydon, England.

Her mother was a Greek refugee and her father from east London.

After Chadwick left Croydon High School, she embarked on a Fine Art Foundation course at Croydon College, then went on to study at Brighton Polytechnic (1973–76).

She recalled, "Traditional media were never dynamic enough… right from early on in art school, I wanted to use the body to create a set of inter-relationships with the audience".

Her degree show Domestic Sanitation (1976) consisted of her and three other women, 'wearing' latex costumes painted directly on to the skin, engaging in a satirical feminist round of cleaning and grooming.

In 1976, Chadwick moved to Hackney and enrolled in a Masters course at Chelsea College of Art (1976–77).

Her BA graduate performance Domestic Sanitation (1976) attempted to highlight the distinction between nudity and nakedness.

Her performers wore another latex skin to cover their skin suggesting the imposition of idealised femininity while they carried out stereotypical female activities.

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 declared that "I'm disappointed that a false rationalism is used as a stick with which to measure what I'm doing when I am looking to cross the taboos that have been instigated. I hate being hauled up as an example of negative women's work."

In 1977, 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 began exhibiting regularly from 1977, gradually building her reputation as an artist.

Her rise into the public sphere was marked by the inclusion of her work Ego Geometria Sum (1983) in a group exhibition entitled Summer Show I (1983) at the Serpentine.

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 1985 she began an active teaching career as a visiting lecturer across a number of London art schools.

Her posts at Goldsmiths (1985–90), Chelsea College of Arts, London (1985–95), Central Saint Martins, London (1987–95) and the Royal College of Art (1990–94) ensured an important influence on contemporary British Art in the late 1980s and ‘90s, specifically on the Young British Artists.

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 oppositions 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."

This exhibition that toured a number of venues in England, Scotland and Switzerland resulted in her nomination for the Turner Prize in 1987.

This was the first year that women were nominated for Britain’s most prestigious contemporary art award.

In 1988 Chadwick made a conscious decision "...not to represent my body.... It immediately declares female gender and I wanted to be more deft."

Her practice then moved inside the body to flesh in her Meat Abstracts (1989) and Meat Lamps (1989-91) and to bodily excrement’s in Piss Flowers (1991–92).

Chadwick commented, "I felt compelled to use materials that were still bodily, that were still a kind of self-portrait, but did not rely on representation of my own body"

Through her career Chadwick’s concerns with gender representation moved from the objectification of women to more closely examine what gender is.

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.

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".

She attempted to complicate the conventional passive objectification of women.

"I was looking at a vocabulary for desire where I was the subject and the object and the author" she said; "I felt by directly taking all theses roles, the normal situation in which the viewer operated as a kind of voyeur broke down".