Helen Chadwick
Helen Chadwick was a conceptual artist who worked between sculpture, architecture, performance, and photography. She studied sculpture at Brighton Polytechnic (1973-76) and completed an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art in London (1976-77). Early performance and installation works created during her time at art school overtly challenged stereotypical gender roles. Clothing, architecture, and spaces of domesticity are explored in works that sit across sculpture and performance which offer a democratic approach to art making and institutional critique. Much of Chadwick’s work centres around questions of subjectivity, desire, the body, and pleasure, and her impetus to break down barriers between the self and the outside world. She experimented with unconventional materials and produced a diverse body of work using her own body, but also meat, flowers, chocolate, and bodily fluids to explore the messiness of the feeling, human subject. Chadwick became the first woman to be nominated for the Turner Prize following her breakthrough solo-exhibition, Of Mutability, held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1986. Her research-based approach to artmaking is evidenced in her archival material housed at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.
