Helen Chadwick

An artist much concerned with ideas of transience, self and identity, particularly female identity, Helen Chadwick was also noted for her controversial use of materials and subject matter. At the time of her sudden death in 1996, at the age of 42, she had attracted the attention of many feminists, writers as well as artists. Chadwick's work of the late 1970s explored her social situation in relation to the kitchen, for example, or the welfare office. In the 1980s, she concentrated more on how the female self is constructed through social and cultural structures. Later works dealt with aspects of death and decay, but always in exceptionally beautiful forms. The artist spoke of the feelings her work provoked as being "gorgeously repulsive, exquisitely fun, dangerously beautiful." This monograph, the first comprehensive survey of Chadwick's work, will include many of her most famous photographs, sculptures and installations: Viral Landscapes, photographic works featuring cells taken from the artist's body, Piss Flowers, sculptures made by casting the holes left by a man and woman urinating in the snow, and "Cacao," a fountain of hot bubbling chocolate.