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.”