Helen Chadwick: Artist, Researcher, Archivist

British artist Helen Chadwick (1953-96) became known for works which incorporated sculpture, photography and installation to explore ideas of the self, gender and the body.

Drawing on science, philosophy and art history, among other subjects, Chadwick combined extensive research and experimentation in her production. Her archive, one of the largest and most consulted collections in the Archive of Sculptors’ Papers, provides a unique insight into her modes of working and thinking about art and the crucial role that research played in her practice.

For Chadwick, research involved not only reading but undertaking field trips and using notebooks to formulate her thoughts and ideas. For the autobiographical installation Ego Geometria Sum 1982-83, she read texts on subjects including astronomy, geometry, hypnosis and tarot, in addition to gathering material connected to places of personal significance, such as Greece, her mother’s home country.

The Oval Court 1984-86, part of her exhibition Of Mutability held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 1986, employed references from sixteenth-century high Renaissance art alongside vanitas still lifes, paintings which used objects to symbolise the transience of life and futility of worldly pleasures. The installation was also testimony to Chadwick’s interest in the ornamental language of eighteenth-century rococo design and architecture.

In the later years of her life, Chadwick increasingly studied scientific literature and cellular biology, utilising scans of her own cells superimposed over images of the Pembrokeshire coast in her Viral Landscapes 1988-89.

Chadwick meticulously collected the materials she used in the research and production of her work, self-archiving her own practice. Her archive contains notebooks, preparatory sketches, test prints, samples, annotated books and articles, as well as source material from her family archive used in her autobiographical works.

In her notebook for Ego Geometria Sum, Chadwick made reference to her ‘personal museum’. Arguably, her archive now takes on the status of just this – forming a record of her modes of working, thinking and making.

Notebooks and sketchbooks

You can browse through digital reproductions of Chadwick’s notebooks and sketchbooks below. They contain detailed research, sketches and ideas, providing a fascinating insight to her early work.