Vanitas II, Helen Chadwick

Helen Chadwick (1953 – 96) created baroque body art, using photography, a photocopier and her own urine to create ripely organic images and objects that multiply and sustain the associations of physical experience, sight, touch, smell. Chadwick’s works range from photographs of fresh meat arranged as lovingly as a 17th-century still life (the camera dwelling on wet, gold-lit compositions of newly butchered flesh), to a series of Viral Landscapes, in which a blotch smears itself across a rocky shore.

She became notorious for Piss Flowers, bronze sculptures derived from the patterns she made urinating in the snow in Canada. But looking at her work now, five years after her early death aged 42, what’s striking is the formal extravagance, literacy and sensual enthusiasm of an art that’s as bodily as that of younger 1990s British artists but much more luxurious.

Advertisement