Helen Chadwick was born in Croydon on 18 May 1953. She studied at the Croydon College of Art, Brighton Polytechnic (1973-76) and the Chelsea School of Art (1976-77). Her early works included Viral Landscapes, a series of photographs from the late 1980s where blotches (actually magnified images of cells from her body) are superimposed over landscapes, and Meat Abstracts (1989) large photographs of meat juxtaposed with leather and fabric. Her work often reflected her sometimes uneasy relationship with her own body. Her innovative use of a rich variety of materials, such as meat, flowers, vegetables, chocolate and fur, was hugely influential on a younger generation of British artists. She was perhaps most famous for Piss Flowers (1991-92), bronze sculptures which were cast from cavities made from urinating in the snow by both Chadwick and her husband David Notarius. Evoking the infantilism and use of chance by the Dadaists, as well as the provocative and politicised work of contemporary artists such as Andrés Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, Piss Flowers represented transgressive behaviour as equally beautiful and disgusting. In her early work, Chadwick questioned the role of the female body in art as a decorative object, just as decorative and aesthetic ideas about art themselves had been questioned in the 20th century, in the late 80s she changed, stating: ‘I made a conscious decision in 1988 not to represent my body. It immediately declares female gender and I wanted to be more deft.’ In 1987 Chadwick was nominated for the Turner Prize for Of Mutability. This work comprised two installations, The Oval Court and Carcass. Carcass was a tall, rigid arrangement of glass panels, filled with rotting household rubbish and the remains of the creatures used for The Oval Court. Carcass was described as a bubbling eco-system of decay. However it sprang a leak and gallons of putrefying slime spilled over a gallery floor, which brought the collection to the public’s attention. In Meat Lamps (1989) she composed a photographic tableaux that combined the fleshy surfaces of meat with electric light. The work has been interpreted to represent the soul of a person as the light and the meat as the flesh to parallel the religious idea that there are two parts to us the body and soul. Her Cibachrome transparencies of 1990 entitled ‘Eroticism’ depicted two brains side by side. Chadwick frequently chose to represent herself in her work, in part to question and confront conventional ideas about the human body, gender and sexuality. Her work also explored such themes as time and decay, gender and identity, the erotic and the cerebral. Her use of a photocopier to record her own body in ‘The Oval Court’ created images which have been described as ‘both frankly realistic and curiously mysterious’. Chadwick died of heart failure in London, at the age of 42 on 15 March 1996. Louisa Buck’s obituary in The Independent newspaper of 18 March 1996 stated: ‘Helen Chadwick was one of contemporary art’s most provocative and profound figures. A perfectionist who revelled in excess, an awesome intellectual who applauded irreverence. Chadwick was the most important artist of her generation, and a crucial inspiration to a multitude of younger artists.’ On the evening of 24 May 2004, a fire broke out in a ‘Momart’ storage warehouse in Leyton, East London. The warehouse was in the centre of a large industrial building that also housed other businesses. The central warehouse was sublet from a household moving company. Arson investigators subsequently determined that burglars started the fire in an attempt to cover up the theft of consumer electronics from one of the other businesses in the building. The blaze destroyed almost all of the artworks stored within. As well as works from other collections, items from the Saatchi collection of so-called ‘Britart’ were lost. Charles Saatchi later commented ‘Many of these pieces are great personal favourites and irreplaceable in British Art.’ Ten of Chadwick’s works were destroyed in the fire. The works belonged to her estate, which had stored a number of pieces with the London art-storage firm. The most significant losses include Cyclops Cameo (1995), a work featuring a photograph of an embryo with one eye. It was part of a group Chadwick was working on when she died. Opal (1996), a piece that included photographs of embryos rejected for implantation during In Vitro fertilisation was also destroyed.