ABSTRACT
The British artist Helen Chadwick (1953-1996) produced an apparently diverse range of work. Underlying this diversity, her oeuvre demonstrates a number of fairly constant preoccupations. In the context of this book, I will discuss her enduring exploration of the impact that an environment can have on people and notions of identity. While this exploration periodically considered buildings or built space, I want to suggest that her oeuvre is much more interesting and challenging, architecturally speaking, when examined in terms of her artistic or creative method. After introducing some of the relevant architectural issues that motivated Chadwick's work, this chapter will discuss how the development of her method reflected her changing understanding of identity politics and the relationship between self and world, and then suggest the latent implications this method continues to hold for both the creative process and the experience of architecture, implications that provide the incentive for studying it at the present time.
