Helen Chadwick

'The Meat Abstracts' (1988) are a series of eight large format Polaroid photographs that Chadwick made at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 1989. Chadwick laid materials such as suede, silk and wood veneer onto a table top, creating a field on which she arranged medleys of meat, offal and knives, brought together with light bulbs and gilded spheres and photographed from above. The series marked Chadwick’s move away from traditional forms of self-representation. Speaking of them, she stated: “I felt compelled to use materials that were still bodily, that were still a kind of self-portrait, but did not rely on the representation of my own body.”

Helen Chadwick (1953 – 1996) was a British sculptor, photographer and installation artist. Chadwick used a variety of unusual materials, including silk, suede, wood, chocolate, lamb’s tongues, and rotting vegetables, which she transformed into “complex installations” using “traditional fabrication methods and sophisticated technologies.” Chadwick played with “binary oppositions” in her work; she created the beautiful out of the repulsive, while questioning traditional male and female stereotypes.

Helen Chadwick completed a BA in Sculpture at the Faculty of Arts and Architecture at Brighton Polytechnic between 1973-6, then went on to receive her MA in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Art in 1977. Important solo exhibitions include 'Wreaths to Pleasure', Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK (2012); 'Helen Chadwick: A Retrospective', Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK (2004); 'Bad Blooms', Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (1995); and 'Of Mutability', Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, London, UK (1996). Chadwick was the first woman to be nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987.