Wee wish you a Merry Christmas: Helen Chadwick’s Piss Flowers

What will you do if it snows this winter? Throw snowballs? Get out the sledge? Or wee in the crisp cold whiteness as art? Helen Chadwick had an eye for the organic. She took closeup photographs of moist, freshly cut meat, superimposed images of her body cells over landscapes, and invented a unique winter methodology to create her Piss Flowers. Chadwick urinated in deep snow, then made casts of the interior spaces – instant caves – melted in the snow by the warm liquid. The resulting white forms of bronze and cellulose lacquer look like alien cities from a frozen planet, or fungal eruptions beneath the surface of the arctic ice. They are unique and haunting winter wonderlands Illustration: PR