Helen Chadwick; Piss in the Snow Flowers

http://www.fineart.ac.uk/works.php?imageid=bt0005

Quotes from effluvia catalogue:
'My apparatus is a body x sensory systems with which to correlate experience' 
Helen Chadwick, 'Soliloquy to flesh', Enfleshings, Secker & Warburg 1998, p109.

'There are twelve piss flowers, each shaped by a unique, an unpredictable event in which the agency of the artist's hand is bypassed in favour of the creative power of urine, normally regarded as polluting and marginal. Here the pleasure of the taboo act is exalted through the object. We are confronted with the fabulous facts of our bodies through things which are childlike and insistent.' 

Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton
Mary Douglas, 'External Boundries' in Purity and Danger 1966. Reprint 1991 Routledge, p114-128.


Piss flowers 1991-92 Helen Chadwick 
Bronze, cellulose lacquer.


Produced during the artist's residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Alberta, Canada.

 .

'These organic, visceral materials are transformed into complex installations by Chadwick's skilled use of traditional methods of fabrication as well as highly sophisticated technologies. The artist enjoys using materials which posses strong haptical and olfactory qualities- to wit, a huge glass column with rotting vegetable matter in Of Mutability in 1986, or, most recently, a fountain of hot bubbling chocolate in Cacao, 1994- thereby implicating the viewer in a powerful sensorial experience. Whether Chadwick is employing strategies of seduction or revulsion, or whether indeed these occur simultaneously, the spectators decipher and complete the work through their own physical presence.'

Andrea Schlieker
Serpentine Gallery
effluvia Serpentine Gallery, London, 19 July - 20th August 1994.