Helen Chadwick

Chadwick liked to get under our skin; she was a sensualist who was drawn to things that make us queasy. Raw meat, rotting vegetables, urine, animal fur, and lots and lots of chocolate are among the materials that have figured in her photography and sculpture.
Over the past three decades, many artists have concocted their photographic subjects in the studio rather than seeking them in the world at large. This strategy puts a premium on imagination, which Chadwick possessed in abundance. What is more, in the fertile realm of her fancy there was no distinction between feeling and thinking. In Bad Blooms, a series of thirteen photographs made in 1992 and 1993, Chadwick turned to flowers.
What could be more natural than flowers? Yet these lush posies are not exactly pretty, and they don't feel entirely natural. The circle is a common form in nature, but the obsessive symmetries of Chadwick's wreaths evoke the ritual perfections of inert geometry. Then there are the goos and liquids, which suggest both the fecund ooze and suck of organic life and the chemical sterility of synthetic gels and detergents. These voluptuous blossoms of paradise are also pungent visions of a nightmare nature remade by humans. Beautiful and vulgar, seductive and repulsive, natural and artificial, feminine and masculine: Chadwick's art merges these opposites in a visceral union that does mischief to the eye and mind.