The Brooklyn Rail

Helen Chadwick (1953–96) was an artist of precision. This may be difficult to reconcile with the woman who created art of hair, flesh, meat, flowers, and rotting vegetables, amongst other body secretions and fragrant fare. Her materials suggest a certain caprice, but her work was meticulous and planned. Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures reveals the time it took the artist to affect this ease. The biography takes on the monumental task of folding forty-two years into a series of pages covered in words and images, many of which are drawn from Chadwick’s extensive archive at the Henry Moore Institute.

Life Pleasures consists of six main chapters, four essays, and two interviews. The first essay, authored by editor Laura Smith, spans almost half the book and follows Chadwick’s life and career in chronological order. Smith portrays the artist as defiant from the very start, influenced by her mother’s Greek heritage, the looming wildlife behind their middle-class British bungalow, and undeniably, her body. Chadwick also knew she was an artist early on, pursuing it with persistence despite poor art marks in school and an art teacher citing her “independent nature” and inability to “concentrate for longer periods” as areas for improvement. On the contrary, Smith’s curation shows a lifetime of all-consuming concentration directed towards the more neglected and deviant parts of our lives.

Of all her work shown in the book, I find myself returning to “Viral Landscapes” (1988–89), introduced almost halfway through. The series of photographs depicts biological samples washed over the Pembrokeshire coast, something like the inside of a human being smeared across the earth. This work was a turning point, both in the book and in Chadwick’s life, for it was the year she stopped using the explicit image of her naked body in her work. Much has been said about her tenuous relationship to then-conceptions of feminism, but the portrayal of this series in the biography is the filmstrip of Chadwick throwing herself, along with the canvas and paints, into the waters. On the page before, she is setting up the camera overhead in order to capture the process. In her work prior to 1988, this laborious effort was intrinsic to the exhibited pieces. Later, it existed only in the documentation: Helen standing on ladders and craning forward; Helen pushing mould atop heavily-packed snow; Helen directing props, mending fabrics, bent down to the grass to dot daisies with markers. Her body, suspended mid-action, is everywhere.

Chadwick was an ardent keeper of sketchbooks and the book makes welcome, if not enough, use of them. A page from her sketchbook shows drawings and Pantone swatches for each Viral Landscape. For Buttocks/Thigh, Fanny, and other pieces in “Body Amputations” (1973), detailed anatomical diagrams of the heart are coupled with newspaper clippings. In the second section, “Fetishistic, quite exquisite, quite troubling,” (named after Chadwick’s own assessment of the garments in Domestic Sanitation, 1976) Philomena Epps writes that in the sketchbook, drawings appear alongside “detailed notes on various topics, including anatomy, divination, mythology and fairy tales.” History runs its course through Chadwick’s work. One of her earlier and more well-known pieces, Ego Geometria Sum (1982–83), consists of ten plywood sculptures, each of which corresponds to a symbolic time in her childhood and weighs her mass at the corresponding age. Its follow-up series, “The Labours” (1983–84), depicts photographs of her interacting with these sculptures—lifting, scrutinizing, and reckoning with them. The name refers to the Twelve Labors of Hercules, one of the many nods to her Greek heritage. Art critic and Chadwick’s friend Louisa Buck writes in her long interview with Smith, “It’s very much her rigour of presentation that allows maximum communication of what she wants to say.”

In the same interview, Buck states, “It is so much a personal matter when something tips from being seductive to repulsive. Helen delighted in pushing such distinctions and ramping up these paradoxes whilst complicating and playing with notions of beauty and acceptability.” When meticulosity is applied to a decomposing carcass, it shows. Chadwick had a gift for adoring the seemingly grotesque. She cradled disgust with the utmost care.