Helen Chadwick’s Of Mutability: process and postmodernism

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the making and historical research that underpins Helen Chadwick’s Of Mutability (1986), and considers how these ideas were re-presented as a postmodern installation. The work is complex and multilayered in its references, and was constructed from a range of mixed media that included photocopies, photo-booth portraits, computer-generated drawings, gold leaf and composting material. In preparation, Chadwick undertook enormous amounts of research, kept detailed notes and explored the possibilities of reproductive media. The article first discusses the installation as a whole, then considers her research into and incorporation of historical tropes, her experiments with the photocopier, and finally how these ideas came together as an open-ended, complex postmodern installation.

KEYWORDS:

• Installation
• postmodernism
• historical contexts
• reproductive media

Acknowledgements

This article was made possible by a sabbatical generously given by Coventry University. I am grateful to many librarians and archivists. In particular I would like to thank those at the Womens Art Library, Tate archive, V&A, Henry Moore Institute and Aspex Gallery.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Imogen Racz is Senior Lecturer in Art History at Coventry University. The article is part of an ongoing research project on sculptural practices in Britain during the 1980s. She has published widely, including a recent book entitled Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday (I. B. Tauris 2015), which is a thematic exploration of post-war sculptural practices related to the abstract ideas that we have about the home.

ORCiD

Imogen Racz http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2201-5484

Notes

1 The exhibition ran from 28th May to 29th June 1986. From the ICA it travelled to the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Spacex Gallery Exeter, Harris Museum Preston, the Kunstverein, Freiburg, and the 3rd Eye Centre in Glasgow.

2 The article was Philippe Fehl, ‘The “Stemme” on Bernini’s Baldacchino in St Peter’s: A Forgotten Compliment’, n.d. no source, 484–490.

3 See letter from Sarah Watson to Helen Chadwick, 14 February 1984, and sheet announcing the workshop. In AG, Helen Chadwick, file B.

4 See for instance the ICA Documents series launched in May 1984 that were collections of papers based on the major discussions at the gallery. The first was Desire, second Culture and State, third Ideas from France, the fourth was a double sized issue on Postmodernism, and the fifth was Identity.

5 See final work in V&A Prints and Drawings dept.

6 See also the interesting discussion about Chadwick’s composite imagery in relation to Hogarth and Boullee, in Stephen Walker, ‘Helen Chadwick’s Composite Images’, Journal of Visual Culture (April 2015), 74–98. http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/14/1/74.full.