Yorkshire. Brontë country. Where the skies seem bigger and the emotions weightier. Especially when there are exhibitions to visit as stirring and provocative as Helen Chadwick at the Hepworth Wakefield and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s curatorial debut at Leeds Art Gallery.
Chadwick (1953-1996) was an impish artistic presence whose career, in her prime, was difficult to miss. She had shows everywhere. But she died too early, aged 42, and for a couple of decades we managed to forget and underestimate her. Until now. Today, her importance, her prescience, her visceral power and her florid feminine cheekiness appear slappingly obvious. And the Wakefield show keeps proving she was ahead of the game.
Her main arena was the female body: her own, and her gender’s: its textures, its symbolism, its juices. Especially the juices. From the absurdly large fondue fountain bubbling wickedly with melted chocolate at the start of the journey to the secret little poem appended to the wall at a naughty kiddy height in the final room — “Drink me harder, my delight/ swell to my bursting pretty sluice/ And piss a posy/ deeper, dear”. This is a notably moist event. The dry world of art is being squirted with distaff liquids.
The show is basically a retrospective looking back on all she achieved. The one advantage of a career as short as hers is that it can be detailed in a single event. And it’s clear from her earliest college work that she was immediately determined to be noisy on the subject of a woman’s lot.
In the Kitchen, performed at Chelsea College of Art in 1977, was a fun event at which she created cheeky outfits for herself modelled on domestic appliances: a fridge, a washing machine, a cooker. She posed naked inside the costumes, with bits of her body sticking out. It was both a rumination on the domestic imprisonment of women and a provocative display of sexual energy, with humorous notes of Confessions of a Handyman.
Getting her kit off happened naturally and frequently. What’s never obvious is if the recurring nudity was seeking to critique the male gaze or just a personal preference. I’d plump for the latter. As the show progresses things get muckier, juicier, more internalised. Instead of admiring the body from the outside, Chadwick moves inside to the organs, the meat, the viscera.
Her most notorious work, Piss Flowers, from 1991-92, is a set of small white sculptures that look like mini stalagmites rising from the floor, but are actually casts of the impression made by Chadwick’s urine as it melted holes in the snow. The white casts are arranged in a ring, like flowers in a meadow.
Her second most notorious work, Carcass, from 1986, is a glass tower filled with rotting vegetation that shifts and burps and bubbles as the decay accelerates. The height of a tall human, Carcass feels like a symbolic vision of ourselves and the progress of life.
All this is ahead of the game because it appears so preternaturally to capture the shamelessness and directness of so much feminine art today. Taboos are being broken. A new shout is being heard. And if I am making any of it sound grimy or sordid, then that is a failure of my writing, not of Chadwick’s art.
One of her more obvious aims was to find beauty in what others would consider to be offal. The show is full of juices and squirting, but it is also poetic, delicate, pretty.
The title of the show, To Improvise a Mountain, sounds poetic because it is a line from one of her poems: “To Improvise a Mountain,/ Is to distinguish a dagger from a musket…” What she wants to get at, I think, is how art doesn’t have to be noisy to be loud. Quietude can have a big impact.
Among the older masters she prefers, we have the interiors of Édouard Vuillard and the landscapes of Pierre Bonnard — fuzzy art, with intimate moods and abstract ambitions. Picasso dismissed Bonnard’s painting as “a potpourri of indecision” and the floating colours and hazy outlines of his Garden at Le Cannet — painted in Vichy France in 1943 — are a dreamy escape from the realities of war.
Another favourite is Walter Sickert, the prickly Edwardian painter of The Camden Town Murder, whose talent for filling a room with loaded atmospheres Yiadom-Boakye has clearly assimilated in her own work.
Among the younger artists she selects there is a pronounced taste for poetic activism — black artists, queer artists, artists, such as Lisa Brice, who fight the feminine fight. The social politics surprised me and seemed to run counter to the moods of Bonnard or Sickert. That said, a gripping music piece by the Otolith Group managed something almost unique in video art — it kept me glued for 45 minutes, from beginning to end.
All this is pleasing and intriguing. But what delights most about the event is the insight it offers into Yiadom-Boakye’s own work. She’s such a mysterious and secretive painter, who never spells out what she’s after in her dreamy black portraits and whispery interiors. Seeing what she admires in others makes it easier to understand what she herself is trying to do.
Helen Chadwick, at the Hepworth Wakefield, until Oct 27; To Improvise a Mountain, at Leeds Art Gallery, until Oct 5