Shifting from early institutional and architectural critique to personal, poetic installations, photography projects and sculptures, British artist Helen Chadwick (1953-1996) produced a wide-ranging body of work in an assortment of media. In this book, Stephen Walker looks beyond the apparent variety of this work and identifies a consistent range of issues and enduring interests.

Critical of the impact that limiting political, philosophical and scientific constructions have on identity, Chadwick’s art can offer insights into a number of major, enduring questions: the relationship between body and space, self and world; between art and science; between artifice and nature; between theory and practice, the creative self and the creative process. Walker combines a close reading of Chadwick’s notebooks and research with a broader investigation of their ongoing relevance for artistic and architectural work today.

Helen Chadwick’s remarkable notebooks reveal how the artist continually wrestled with profound questions of form and execution, ethics and passions, decorum and aberration. Stephen Walker has drawn deeply on this almost untapped rich archival material to provide a vigorous and searching picture of Chadwick’s aesthetic and intellectual adventurousness. Chadwick’s innovations still startle, and Stephen Walker discusses brilliantly the processes of thinking and making that brought them into being. -Marina Warner, writer and academic, University of Essex