Helen Chadwick: Thinking Between Art and Architecture

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The British artist Helen Chadwick (1953-1996) produced an apparently diverse range of work using a wide range of media. This project sets out to ask: in what ways, and to what extent, can Chadwick's oeuvre inform and invigorate current architectural thinking?Mark Sladen has recently suggested that the wealth of ideas in Chadwick's oeuvre met an unreceptive audience in the 'sensationalist and anti-intellectual' atmosphere of the art world in the years immediately after her death (Sladen 2004). However, recent work demonstrates an increasing openness to inter-disciplinary working, such that the kind of cross fertilisation of ideas that was central to Chadwick's approach is now being taken seriously, both in academia, architectural and artistic practice. Chadwick's thoughts on architecture were developed as part of a broader raft of ideas at one remove from her artistic projects; their role was to raise questions rather than provide answers. Her thoughts were not constrained to a narrow disciplinary conception of 'architecture,' but instead enjoyed a wide-ranging and inherently inter-disciplinary approach that included both timely and timeless issues. Her research demonstrates a wide knowledge, appreciation and understanding of architectural issues, historical periods, cultures, and theories, and this brings a remarkable maturity and breadth of understanding to an already receptive situation.The intention of this project is not to recuperate Helen Chadwick's work as 'architecture,' nor to contest existing art-historical reception: instead, it sets out to articulate and explore the ways in which her work can be brought to bear on contemporary debate within architecture, and between art and architecture. The importance and relevance of the project's questions emerge because the architectural issues she addressed remain current (indeed, some are now in more urgent need of attention), and because her work can continue to raise questions that sustain thinking here. It will ask:-What was her conception of the creative process, and how might this affect the role of the artist or architect?-What factors did she believe affected the experience of architecture, and what role might these play in identity formation?-How did she conceive the complex relationships between artifice and nature, myth, history and both classical and modern science? Where and how might such relationships bear on current architectural thinking?-What questions does her work raise concerning the relationship between theory and practice?These research questions develop around Chadwick's thirteen notebooks and associated papers, kept from March 1972 up to her death in 1996, plus preparatory lecture notes, and marginal notes in her library, all of which are contained in the Henry Moore Institute (HMI) archive in Leeds. I have already spent a month working in the archive, funded by the HMI. These notebooks evidence a complex and tangled web of research, ideas and speculation about wide-ranging issues. Within this tangle, individual strands of research are legible, articulate, meticulous and triangulated: the first stage of work is to extract the various strands that contribute to her architectural thinking and lay these bare.The subsequent, more important, methodological move echoes Chadwick's own method of 'juggling' or 'bisociation' (a technique she borrows from Arthur Koestler). Here, these strands of her work will be creatively combined with other critical and architectural theories, in order to demonstrate the range of architectural implications already contained within her research (explicit or latent), and to develop the investigation of these in new directions that bear more tangibly on current architectural thinking.This project will broaden the understanding of Chadwick's work, demonstrate its ongoing relevance and the incentive for studying it at the present time, and widen the range of disciplinary interest in her oeuvre.