Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures at the Hepworth Wakefield

The Hepworth Wakefield hosts a major retrospective of work by legendary artist Helen Chadwick (1953 – 1996). She is best known for her unique approach to sensuality and the body, both human and animal with thought-provoking and visceral work.

Chadwick’s retrospective maps the development of her career, which despite lasting less than two decades (she died suddenly aged only 42), resulted in some of the most original and honest artworks of our time.

Life Pleasures dives into an oeuvre of opposites – Chadwick’s feminist works pair the poetics of desire with bodily fluids; fresh food with compost; pleasure with pain.

Using unexpected materials throughout her practice, the artist often focused on feminist issues with humour and playfulness. She used urine, meat, flowers, fabric, lightbulbs, chocolate and many other components in her works, often questioning ideas of beauty by adding an element of repulsion. Her innovative thinking led to her being one of the first women to be nominated for the Turner prize in 1987.

The exhibition charts her earliest work, like the degree show installation and performance In the Kitchen (1977) all the way through to some of her best known sculptures such as Piss Flowers (1991–2). You’ll find a satisfying mix of wall-based and sculptural pieces, and everything in between.

In the Kitchen (1977) featured Chadwick and three other performers dressed as kitchen appliances – a fridge, an oven, a washing machine and a kitchen sink. Cacao (1994) is a giant chocolate fountain, bubbling away and filling every corner of the room with its heady, sweet scent. Ego Geometria Sum: the Labours consist of 10 wooden sculptures with images of the artist’s body printed on the three-dimensional forms, marking key moments in her childhood. The previously mentioned Piss Flowers are painted bronze casts of the imprints left by warm urine in the snow. The marks were made by Chadwick and her husband and resulted in fantastical, phallic flower shapes that have been exhibited for decades all around the world.

These examples give a taste of Chadwick’s versatility, her constant search for novel materials and and feminist approaches. Yet perhaps the key appeal of it is the lack of conceptual opaqueness – these are works which can be both understood and felt on a bodily level, with awe and disgust sitting side by side.

Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures is a fantastic opportunity to see this iconic artist’s work in the North, and discover the impact she had on her own contemporaries and the course of international contemporary art since. 

While you’re visiting the exhibition, don’t miss Caroline Walker: Mothering which is on display at the same time.