A bubbling Jacuzzi-sized fountain of molten chocolate greets visitors at the entrance to Life Pleasures, a major retrospective of British artist Helen Chadwick at the Hepworth gallery in Wakefield. The piece, named Cacao, was made in 1994, two years before the artist’s sudden death of a heart attack aged just 42.
The installation encourages visitors to engage their senses of smell and sound as well as sight. These faculties are critical in approaching Chadwick’s sensorially and materially rich body of work. The sounds of the work’s electric motor and tantalising smell of its gurgling chocolate are everywhere throughout the show.
The exhibition is the largest survey of Chadwick’s work yet, and her first since A Retrospective at the Barbican in London in 2004.
Chadwick’s student work, Knitted Lillet Blood Cycle (1975) – a collection of ten life-sized, delicately knitted tampons depicted at various stages of crimson saturation – is the earliest work in the show.
Between this and Cacao – two moments in the arc of her life and artistic practice – lie a multitude of rich, often witty and still fresh innovations with materials and forms in two and three dimensions.
Collectively, they form an evolving self-portrait whether explicitly depicting the artist’s own body or representing it by other means. Carcass (1986) is a case in point.
A tower of glass and Perspex, it mimics the vertical posture of an upright human body for which it is a proxy. Filled with organic matter – waste from the gallery cafe downstairs – it will continue to decay and be topped up over the course of the exhibition, performing the cyclical process of the human digestive system.
Chadwick’s greatest hits
Some of the pieces in the show will be familiar to those who know the artist’s work. This includes a series of photographs documenting Chadwick’s 1977 performance work In the Kitchen, for which she produced soft, wearable sculptures of domestic white goods including a washing machine and cooker.
Piss Flowers (1991-92) are also on show, in which the artist and her husband David Notarius urinated into snow that was densely packed into a large flower-shaped cookie cutter. The resulting hollows were cast in bronze before being coated in white lacquer.
Inverted, they appear as surreal oversized flowers, performing an unexpected gender reversal due to the deeper – and therefore taller once inverted – effect produced by the female urinary pattern which is recast as a suggestively phallic stamen.
Other works similarly question gender norms and stereotypes.
Self-portrait (1991) is a wall-mounted and back-lit transparent photograph. It depicts the artist’s hands gently cradling a human brain against a backdrop of ruched velvet. It is impossible to assign gender to this organ, denuded of the external bodily signifiers from which any socially inscribed concept of identity might normally be read.
The sculptural installations The Oval Court (1984-86) and Ego Geometria Sum (1983) also explore the construction of narratives about the self.
Both works have been reconstructed for Life Pleasures. The latter has been reassembled from individual works held in several public and private collections and the Arts Council Collection.
In both of these installations, as with many others on show here, the artist experimented with photographic processes – a touchstone throughout her career. She was pushing the boundaries of the medium materially through processes such as photocopying, and conceptually by exploring its three-dimensional properties. That’s demonstrated through the series of wall-mounted sculptures that combine slick photographic images with various timbers, glass, aluminium and light.
Chadwick’s enduring relevance
In part, Life Pleasures restages many of the works included in Effluvia, Chadwick’s 1994 exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery.
I was lucky enough to experience that exhibition just as my fine art studies at the University of Leeds were coming to an end. By 1994 Chadwick could be described in the exhibition’s catalogue as “one of Britain’s most prominent and provocative contemporary artists”.
Her work as an artist and educator has been as influential for subsequent generations of female practitioners, in particular, as it was for me as a young art student then.
Life Pleasures again reveals Chadwick as a sculptor of exactitude and thrilling inventiveness. Her unique work combines glossy, seductive precision with a delicate, tactile mastery of materials. Even as it explores the inescapable realities of the human body: its vulnerability, impurity and mutability.
Seen in tandem with the fascinating Helen Chadwick: Artist, Researcher, Archivist now on show at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, Life Pleasures provides a very welcome opportunity to reassess Chadwick’s legacy and the enduring relevance of her work in the context of contemporary debates on sex and gender. Her often-cited status as an explicitly feminist artist, however, remains largely unexplored in deeper terms here.
Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures is at the Hepworth, Wakefield until October 27.
Kerry Harker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
