ヘレン・チャドウィックのフェミニストボディアート入門ガイド

Over the course of her short life, Helen Chadwick left an indelible mark on British art. Whip-smart and punkishly irreverent, much of her work explores the complex, often contradictory, experience of life – and death – in a woman’s body. 

Chadwick grew up in Croydon, born to an estate agent father and a mother who emigrated from Athens as a refugee. Her prolific output went hand in hand with work as a much-loved university tutor (although Chadwick failed her own art ‘O level’), and advocate for artist communities. She became the first woman to receive a Turner Prize nomination in 1987, and had a solo show at MoMA in 1995. But, disliking fame, she longed to escape to a dilapidated house she’d bought in her mother’s native Peloponnese. Tragically, in 1996, aged 42, Chadwick died suddenly from heart failure following a day of meetings. 

Life Pleasures, a new exhibition at Hepworth Wakefield, is the largest survey of Chadwick’s work to date. The exhibition demonstrates her restless innovation, materially and conceptually, working across performance, photography, metal, installation, print and book-making, lightboxes and textiles. At the Hepworth, interrogations of class politics, gender and sexism sit alongside deeply researched enquiries into, in the artist’s words, the “enigmas and riddles of selfhood”. 

Here, AnOther explores the defining chapters of Chadwick’s life and work. 

1. She performed as kitchen appliances for her MA degree show

For Chadwick’s 1976 undergraduate exhibition, the artist painted her naked body with latex and performed farcical, erotic scenes with a group of women in a piece titled Domestic Sanitation. The following year, she made a series of costumes resembling whitegoods for her MA at Chelsea College of Art. During what was to become a seminal performance, Chadwick and her collaborators were rendered immobile within expertly crafted metal and PVC structures. The action was set to collaged radio segments, one of which proclaimed: “Well, here is ‘kitchen-lib’, where a woman can do time in her kitchen and actually enjoy herself.” Equal parts witty, unnerving and angry, In the Kitchen mines and troubles the language of fashion and fetishism.

2. Contemporary feminists took issue with her using her naked body

In the 1980s, agitprop feminists criticised what they perceived as Chadwick’s rewarding of the male gaze. She maintained, however, that, as the “subject and the object and the author” of the work, “the normal situation in which the viewer operated as a kind of voyeur broke down”. Nevertheless, under fire, she shifted focus to more explicitly socio-political work, including a replica dole office playing audio interviews with welfare recipients in Model Institution (1981). Having reintroduced her body in autobiographical installations such as 1983’s Ego Geometria Sum – in which plywood forms representing her physical mass at key life stages were innovatively printed with her photographic image – she abandoned her naked form entirely in 1988, exhausted by the debate.

3. Her seminal Piss Flowers were about penis envy

Subtler manifestations of the body recur in Chadwick’s later work, including Piss Flowers (1991–92), made with her husband David Notarius in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. There, she used a sheet metal mould to pack dense blocks of snow, which her and Notarius took turns to piss into. Chadwick made casts of the sprays and apertures caused by the urine and inverted them to create bronze towers. She described the work as a “penis-envy farce” – her piss made strong, phallic forms because women’s urine is typically hotter than men’s, and is expressed with greater force. Notarius’s, meanwhile, has a softer, more dispersed effect. 

4. She was obsessed with ideas of excess and repulsion

Chadwick was disinterested in traditional hierarchies of materials and regularly worked with organic matter. Her media ranged from snow, food, window cleaner, engine oil, animal carcasses, urine, the cells and form of her body, flowers, chocolate – in Cacao, a huge vat of molten, bubbling liquid – fur, hair, bubble bath and bronze. She often alluded to the notion of the ‘abject’ – the socially reviled and discarded, which was crucial to feminist thought – enacting a push and pull of repulsion and intrigue, mental and physical. For her 1986 ICA show, Of Mutability, she presented Carcass, a vast vitrine filled with her studio neighbours’ food waste and the remains of matter used in other artworks in the show. During the exhibition, gas from the vitrine’s fermenting contents blew its lid off, spraying waste through the galleries.

5. She was a mentor to artists Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas

In 1977, Chadwick squatted a run of derelict buildings due for demolition in Beck Road, Hackney with a group of artists. After lengthy campaigning, the building was eventually licensed to the artists by Acme, and Chadwick threw herself into creating a series of affordable home studios. Beck Road residents included Cosey Fanni Tutti, Maureen Paley and Genesis P-Orridge. Chadwick also taught at the RCA, Goldsmiths, Chelsea and Central Saint Martins, and her students included Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and Anya Gallaccio. Her influence can clearly be seen in the work of artists who became known collectively as the YBAs. Gallacio remembers in the Life’s Pleasures catalogue: “As a woman artist, by being visible, and importantly accessible, she made the idea of being an artist real … Her work was initially beautiful, it seduced you into looking closer, but on second view was alienating, ambiguous.”

Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures is on view at Hepworth Wakefield until 27 October 2025.

Over the course of her short life, Helen Chadwick left an indelible mark on British art. Whip-smart and punkishly irreverent, much of her work explores the complex, often contradictory, experience of life – and death – in a woman’s body. 

Chadwick grew up in Croydon, born to an estate agent father and a mother who emigrated from Athens as a refugee. Her prolific output went hand in hand with work as a much-loved university tutor (although Chadwick failed her own art ‘O level’), and advocate for artist communities. She became the first woman to receive a Turner Prize nomination in 1987, and had a solo show at MoMA in 1995. But, disliking fame, she longed to escape to a dilapidated house she’d bought in her mother’s native Peloponnese. Tragically, in 1996, aged 42, Chadwick died suddenly from heart failure following a day of meetings. 

Life Pleasures, a new exhibition at Hepworth Wakefield, is the largest survey of Chadwick’s work to date. The exhibition demonstrates her restless innovation, materially and conceptually, working across performance, photography, metal, installation, print and book-making, lightboxes and textiles. At the Hepworth, interrogations of class politics, gender and sexism sit alongside deeply researched enquiries into, in the artist’s words, the “enigmas and riddles of selfhood”. 

Here, AnOther explores the defining chapters of Chadwick’s life and work. 

1. She performed as kitchen appliances for her MA degree show

For Chadwick’s 1976 undergraduate exhibition, the artist painted her naked body with latex and performed farcical, erotic scenes with a group of women in a piece titled Domestic Sanitation. The following year, she made a series of costumes resembling whitegoods for her MA at Chelsea College of Art. During what was to become a seminal performance, Chadwick and her collaborators were rendered immobile within expertly crafted metal and PVC structures. The action was set to collaged radio segments, one of which proclaimed: “Well, here is ‘kitchen-lib’, where a woman can do time in her kitchen and actually enjoy herself.” Equal parts witty, unnerving and angry, In the Kitchen mines and troubles the language of fashion and fetishism.

2. Contemporary feminists took issue with her using her naked body

In the 1980s, agitprop feminists criticised what they perceived as Chadwick’s rewarding of the male gaze. She maintained, however, that, as the “subject and the object and the author” of the work, “the normal situation in which the viewer operated as a kind of voyeur broke down”. Nevertheless, under fire, she shifted focus to more explicitly socio-political work, including a replica dole office playing audio interviews with welfare recipients in Model Institution (1981). Having reintroduced her body in autobiographical installations such as 1983’s Ego Geometria Sum – in which plywood forms representing her physical mass at key life stages were innovatively printed with her photographic image – she abandoned her naked form entirely in 1988, exhausted by the debate.

3. Her seminal Piss Flowers were about penis envy

Subtler manifestations of the body recur in Chadwick’s later work, including Piss Flowers (1991–92), made with her husband David Notarius in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. There, she used a sheet metal mould to pack dense blocks of snow, which her and Notarius took turns to piss into. Chadwick made casts of the sprays and apertures caused by the urine and inverted them to create bronze towers. She described the work as a “penis-envy farce” – her piss made strong, phallic forms because women’s urine is typically hotter than men’s, and is expressed with greater force. Notarius’s, meanwhile, has a softer, more dispersed effect. 

4. She was obsessed with ideas of excess and repulsion

Chadwick was disinterested in traditional hierarchies of materials and regularly worked with organic matter. Her media ranged from snow, food, window cleaner, engine oil, animal carcasses, urine, the cells and form of her body, flowers, chocolate – in Cacao, a huge vat of molten, bubbling liquid – fur, hair, bubble bath and bronze. She often alluded to the notion of the ‘abject’ – the socially reviled and discarded, which was crucial to feminist thought – enacting a push and pull of repulsion and intrigue, mental and physical. For her 1986 ICA show, Of Mutability, she presented Carcass, a vast vitrine filled with her studio neighbours’ food waste and the remains of matter used in other artworks in the show. During the exhibition, gas from the vitrine’s fermenting contents blew its lid off, spraying waste through the galleries.

5. She was a mentor to artists Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas

In 1977, Chadwick squatted a run of derelict buildings due for demolition in Beck Road, Hackney with a group of artists. After lengthy campaigning, the building was eventually licensed to the artists by Acme, and Chadwick threw herself into creating a series of affordable home studios. Beck Road residents included Cosey Fanni Tutti, Maureen Paley and Genesis P-Orridge. Chadwick also taught at the RCA, Goldsmiths, Chelsea and Central Saint Martins, and her students included Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and Anya Gallaccio. Her influence can clearly be seen in the work of artists who became known collectively as the YBAs. Gallacio remembers in the Life’s Pleasures catalogue: “As a woman artist, by being visible, and importantly accessible, she made the idea of being an artist real … Her work was initially beautiful, it seduced you into looking closer, but on second view was alienating, ambiguous.”

Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures is on view at Hepworth Wakefield until 27 October 2025.