Life Pleasures - Helen Chadwick's exhibition

A few weeks ago, I went on a short artistic trip to the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield and - oh my days - what an exhibition that was! Helen Chadwick had been completely unknown to me before, but I trusted my friend’s recommendation. Besides, I didn’t want to miss another chance to see Hepworth’s sculptures - dominating the gallery’s minimalist spaces with their soft, flowing forms.

Cacao (1994)

Our encounter with Chadwick started completely innocently - with a round tub full of bubbling hot chocolate. The piece, titled Cacao, is the first stop of the retrospective exhibition Life Pleasures in Wakefield. A stop that did absolutely nothing to prepare us for what was coming next.

In the next room, I was drawn to a series of twelve photographs - In the Kitchen - in which the artist poses in costumes representing kitchen appliances. It was a record of her 1977 graduate project and a satirical commentary on the image of a woman as a “domestic goddess.” The next work consisted of fabric torsos with pubic hair - most likely made of human hair, because as I learned from the wall text, Chadwick often used such materials in her art. I thought: strange, I don’t fully understand it, but each to their own. 

Knitted Lillet Blood Cycle (1975)

Then I approached a rather unsettling glass display cabinet filled with something that looked like used tampons. And indeed - they were tampons, only knitted ones, representing different stages of menstrual bleeding. At this point, I began frantically reading the artist’s biography on the wall, desperately searching for some life-changing event that would explain her fascination with bodily fluids. No luck - Chadwick seemed to have been breaking taboos from the very beginning of her career and I was left alone with my bewilderment and inability to grasp the art surrounding me.

Loop my Loop (1991)

In the next room, I was greeted by Loop My Loop - a photograph of blonde hair intertwined with pig intestines, meant to symbolise two sides of human relationships: the romantic and the more animalistic. I thought - disgusting, but I get the idea. The gallery floor, meanwhile, was covered with white, petal-like sculptures - according to the description on the wall, so-called Piss Flowers. And the sculptures were exactly what the title suggested - they were created by placing metal flower molds into snow, urinating into them, and then filling the resulting shapes with plaster. For the skeptics, the flower sculptures were accompanied by black-and-white photographs illustrating the process.

Increasingly bewildered, I moved on to the next room, which featured one of the less disturbing pieces in the exhibition - Ego Geometria Sum - a series of photographic “boxes” representing stages of the artist’s life from birth to age thirty. They were created using plywood shaped into objects that in different moments of her life had surrounded or shaped her body - a pram, a boat, a statue. The elegance of the sepia-toned images contrasted with the sweetness of the pink curtains draped around the installation. It was a moment of calm before the storm, something meant to quiet us before the final part of the exhibition.

Ego Geometria Sum (1983)

In the centre of the last room stood a two-metre-tall transparent tank filled with compost, bubbling away in the process of fermentation - a piece called Carcass. We all know that Poles have a fondness for fermentation - greetings to all lovers of pickled cucumbers - but even for me this was a bit too much. Staring at the rotting food scraps, I wondered what the purpose of this bubbling artwork was supposed to be. I feel like primary school already gave me a sufficiently thorough explanation of the cycle of life. I also remembered the compost in my grandmother’s garden, which had never struck me as exciting enough to place in an art gallery.

Carcass (1986)

Overcome with disgust and confusion, I walked into the room with Hepworth’s sculptures - to let my mind rest, digest what I had just seen, and perhaps figure out why we needed to look at rotting food in an art gallery. But after a moment - driven by that dark impulse that makes us unable to look away from a car crash - I went back to Chadwick’s piece to look once more at the compost tank and the surrounding photographs of decaying meat.

I am not an art critic, and I stopped trying to become one a long time ago. I love art for the  visual experience it gives me and its ability to transport me into a calm, drama-free space. I always experience it emotionally rather than rationally - I don’t try to explain what I see, but rather feel it. And that’s exactly why I often struggle with contemporary art - especially installations and sculptures - because they rarely evoke emotions on their own, without the extra narrative provided in curators’ notes. I was convinced that Chadwick’s exhibition would be the same. But something else happened. Its strangeness, the complete disconnection of the artworks from the space around me, and some internal resistance to what I was seeing made a much stronger impression on me than I had anticipated.

When we left the gallery and sat down with cups of coffee and hot chocolate - utterly confused and physically repulsed - we still didn’t realise that Chadwick had achieved her goal. Because, as I later learned, the aim of her art was to provoke a direct bodily experience - bypassing social concepts and explanations. And perhaps a tank of rotting vegetables is indeed one of the more effective ways to achieve that, because even now, the mere memory makes my face twist in disgust. Yet I’m still not sure whether this is the kind of experience I want from art. My brain, exhausted by the daily overflow of madness pouring out of the television and the internet, tends to gravitate instead toward Sorolla’s play of light and the palette of Vanessa Bell. But maybe I simply don’t know any better…