Helen Chadwick: Disrupting the Conventions of Feminine Display

Although she was widely exhibited during her lifetime, attention to Helen Chadwick’s work declined following her unexpected death in 1996, and it is only relatively recently that the significance of her work has been acknowledged afresh. She is now revered as a pioneering feminist artist. Her art was radical, provocative, and often reflected on the sensuous aspects of the natural world, breaking taboos of the ‘traditional’ or ‘beautiful’. Chadwick was unafraid to experiment with her medium, using sculpture, performance and photography to create remarkable commentaries on the world around her. She quickly became a leading figure amongst Britain’s post-war avant-garde, becoming one of the first women to be nominated for the Turner Prize.

Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures explores the significance of her work and focuses on Chadwick’s interdisciplinary interests and engagement with education, music and politics. The book publishes to coincide with a major retrospective at The Hepworth Wakefield from 17 May to 27 October 2025.

We spoke to Laura Smith – author of Helen Chadwick, and Director of Collection and Exhibitions at The Hepworth Wakefield – about the revival of attention on Chadwick’s work and the importance of her recognition today.

Thames & Hudson (TH): Do you remember your first encounter with Helen’s work? What was it that initially drew you to her?

Laura Smith (LS): I think the first work I saw was during a feminism module while on my BA in Fine Art. We were shown images of In the Kitchen which just blew my mind– in terms of its boldness, its potent feminism and its humour. To be that playful with her own body and her own politics – while remaining fiercely true to those politics – really struck me. As did the meticulousness and skill in her making. I remember being so eager to know more!

TH: Chadwick was widely shown during her lifetime but faded from view after her unexpected death nearly thirty years ago. Why do you think her work is being rediscovered now?

LS: I think she was a victim of her own brilliance as a teacher. Sadly, she died just as the artists who she taught (Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and others from the Young British Artists group) were experiencing a rapid rise to fame (and one that she probably would have experienced too). But their popularity, I think, eclipsed her which is such a huge shame. This book though, and the exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield, which is the largest retrospective to date of Chadwick’s work, and the first in over twenty years, recognizes her as an artist of vital importance to the development of contemporary art in Britain (and arguably the world!). Her work has inspired several generations of artists and audiences and yet she is underserved in terms of both exhibitions and publications. My argument would be that both the exhibition and book should have happened sooner! I have been striving to create a Chadwick retrospective for some time, and when I was appointed at The Hepworth it made complete sense that we should be the home for this exhibition, as a museum dedicated to the legacy of a(nother) great British woman sculptor. It was actually a show I proposed in my interview for the post! And so we are thrilled now to have been able to produce both the exhibition and the publication at this time.

TH: Helen Chadwick often combined beauty with materials that many people might find shocking or strange – like meat, compost or bodily fluids. Do you think her use of these materials reflect a feminist strategy of confronting taboo or abject subject matter? What do you think she was trying to challenge or say through these choices?

LS: Across her work, she was fascinated by some of the biggest themes that affect us as human beings: life, death, desire, sex, beauty, disease and decay. She employed such a diverse and surprising range of materials as an attempt to make us respond physically to her works. Her thinking was that if our reactions are bodily (almost reflex actions), then our responses to her works might be more genuine, honest and subjective – and unaffected by societal or cultural constructs of beauty, desire or disgust.

TH: Piss Flowers – featured on the book cover – is considered Chadwick’s most famous work. What do you think Chadwick was saying about gendered creation myths or bodily power?

LS: Her choice to use a flower as her form for these sculptures is significant. Flowers are the reproductive organs of plants, and they often contain both male and female sex organs – just as these bronze flowers do. In an accompanying poem written for the works, she describes them as ‘vaginal towers with male skirt’. Through their mischievous inversion of traditional gender roles, they deliberately play on sexual difference and even muddy the whole notion of singularity or specificity of gender, as she commented: ‘Piss Flowers synthesise sexual difference through the erotic play both of their making and their forms’. Throughout her career Chadwick expressed concerns with gender representation, moving from her early explorations into the objectification of women to a much more involved consideration of what gender is and can be. After reading the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century hermaphrodite whose writing was discovered and published by Michel Foucault in 1980, she asked: ‘why do we feel compelled to read gender, and automatically wish to sex the body before us so we can orientate our desire and thus gain pleasure or reject what we see?’

TH: In the book, you talk about her attention to examining and dismantling the myth of the woman. What do you think feminism meant to Helen and how do you think she embraced the movement of her time?

LS: I think she was a feminist in everything that she did but also that her relationship with several feminists of her time was problematic. She became target of some heavy criticism from a generation of women who objected to her use of her own naked body in her work and accused her of regressive female narcissism. Their denigration centred around the idea that Chadwick’s use of her body was actively perpetuating the objectification of women and reinforcing the very stereotypes that she sought to subvert. But from Chadwick’s perspective, she was interested in complicating the idea of the objectification of women, as she said: ‘I was looking at a vocabulary for desire where I was the subject and the object and the author.… I felt by directly taking all these roles, the normal situation in which the viewer operated as a kind of voyeur broke down.’ She wanted to both expose and exploit the conventional modes of feminine display and to challenge the idea of the female body as a site of spectacle. Her retort was: ‘I’m disappointed that a false rationalism is used as a stick with which to measure what I’m doing when I am looking to cross the taboos that have been instigated. I hate being hauled up as an example of negative women’s work.’

TH: How do you think her work engages with the male gaze – does it subvert it, reclaim it, or something else?

LS: I think that a lot of her work confronts the long tradition of female nudes made by male artists for the pleasure of other men. Chadwick deliberately disrupts this convention by introducing herself into the work. As both the artist and subject of the work, the naked figure – her naked figure – is not a supine model but the creator of the work of art.

TH: Her work crosses so many forms – sculpture, photography, performance. Do you think Chadwick saw boundaries between these mediums, or was she deliberately trying to break them down?

LS: I don’t think she saw boundaries anywhere! I think she was fearless in that she used the form or medium that she thought would be most appropriate to the manifestation of her ideas – whether that was finding a new, ingenious method of printing photographs directly onto plywood or casting with her own urine! I feel certain that she did not concern herself with whether a boundary was being crossed or something was taboo or not done before. If she wanted to use a technique or material that she hadn’t used previously, she taught herself how to use it or do it, she asked for help and for favours and she was constantly learning and curious about the world and its constructions.

TH: You write about how Chadwick mentored many of the Young British Artists. What kind of influence did she have on them?

LS: From 1985 until her death in 1996, Chadwick taught at a number of London art schools including Goldsmiths, The Slade, Chelsea and The Royal College of Art. I think she certainly – and quite obviously – inspired the YBAs, most of whom she taught and encouraged to experiment with unusual materials as well their own bodies and biographies. But she also taught artists working now who are not associated with that group, and many of them have spoken about how she emboldened them to follow their own creative freedom and subjectivities. On a larger level, her work is brave, bold and effervescent, she was mischievous, luxurious, uncompromising, funny, feminist and dedicated. I honestly don’t think that British art would look the same now without her.

TH: The book also looks at her life – her politics, teaching and involvement in music. How important is it to understand these parts of her life to fully grasp her art?

LS: I think it is hard to separate any of the outputs of her creativity. Her politics informed her art and her entire way of life, she was a wholly dedicated artist, teacher, friend and colleague, and she approached all of these things (I am told) with incredible openness, sensitivity and care. She helped and supported others in all aspects of her life and strove to consistently push herself to express her thinking around feminism, beauty, desire and life in ways that would delight and surprise her audiences into real feeling. I really believe that the body of work that she left us with is one of the most accomplished and remarkable of recent generations. And I wish that she had lived longer to be able to keep making and inspiring us.

Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures by Laura Smith is available now.