Helen Chadwick: Artist, Researcher, Archivist

After Ego Geometria Sum… how, what happened – I wanted to use the body again but not bound up in these geometric structures that seemed like a real Newtonian world. I wanted something much more sort of leaky and fluid and I was looking at things like Greek pottery, the way you get kind of like a dance of figures, and from then looking at Rococo and Baroque, fresco, and vaults – painted vaults. And I’d also had a bad experience with a photographer and the problems of authorship in terms of collaborations with photographers and I thought, I don’t want to use a bloody photographer again I want to work absolutely directly so I have all the power at my disposal. And I thought well if I use something like a photocopier it’s just me pressing the button. I don’t need a camera, a technician, anything at all. It’s much more intimate. And I was in the underground one day and there was this huge poster of doves. And one dove was white, and one dove was blue and one dove was brown, and it was an advert for the new Canon state-of-the-art copier that didn’t just have a black and white facility it had blue and brown toner and it had been in my head that the colour for this thing had to be blue, and I just saw this and that’s it, and I rang up Canon and there followed a kind of chase for the copier.

Mark Haworth-Booth: When did the commission for Of Mutability come about then because it’s two years work. Were you making it anyway before you knew anything about…?

Helen Chadwick: Yeah, the ICA, yeah I’d started to make it. And part of the thing was I wanted to show it in a space that was not a sterile white cube. I wanted a kind of sense of history to the building a play with maybe the Baroque. In this country it’s kind of limited. I’d been to Bavaria and photographed Rococo architecture. You know, the churches, the pilgrimage churches, the palaces. And given that the main part Of Mutability is this raised blue floor that’s like an inverted vault I kind of wanted an architecture that would play on that and, I guess in London you know there aren’t too many options and the ICA was the ideal space, so I called them and asked them to do a studio visit.

Mark Haworth-Booth: What took you to look at these wonderful churches – because looking at Rococo churches isn’t every punk artist’s bag at that particular stage is it?

Helen Chadwick: I found a book in a book shop, it might have been Foyles I can’t remember or Waterstones but I don’t know if Waterstones existed then maybe it just did, and it was a book called ‘Rococo Architecture’ and I looked at it and I thought this is incredible. And I bought it, it was very expensive, showed it to my partner, he was very interested, he was well he is an architect. And we decided to go there. So we went on holiday one Easter. Hired a car in Munich and drove out into the Bavarian meadows. It’s one of the few occasions where a research was a very direct experience that kind of fed something very, very organically. One of the few occasions when research wasn’t research it was actually life. I’d love to think that might happen again but maybe I’m too long in the tooth to be so enthused by something unexpected.

So I kind of devised a project if you like that was very literally a synthesis between the landscape and something of the place. Something that you know the writing that the place could make and my… my own self through merging cell tissue, my blood cells, my various kind of tissue samples with landscape and the writing of the sea. And I think those negotiations are fascinating in a way because they open up… possibilities for constructing yourself anew that perhaps you wouldn’t be able to deal with if you worked in a more hermetic environment. In fact I would welcome perhaps you know the crazier the invitation, it just might galvanise me that bit harder to generate something that could account for the mechanics of that situation and then the emotive side to it and the subjectivity of it.