Helen Chadwick was born in Croydon, London. She worked as a sculptor and film-maker but is particularly known for her photography. She used her own body as the subject of her work, incorporating photographs of herself in large installations. Seeking to avoid an overtly gender-based narrative, in the late 1980s she took self-portraiture a step further, making exquisite Polaroid photographs of raw meat and innards: sexually provocative, they were suggestive of human flesh. Following these ‘Meat Abstracts’ was a series of colour photographs called Meat Lamps which were sandwiched within glass plates and lit by electric lights.

This Self-portrait belongs to this Meat Lamps series. Self-portrait shows the artist’s own hands, gently cradling a disembodied, walnut-like brain. Regardless of gender, age, race or intelligence, everyone’s brain looks much the same as everyone else’s. This is, as it were, a portrait of all brains, a kind of collective self-portrait. When we look at the work our brains are effectively looking at themselves – a potentially unsettling experience given that the brain is at the core of our identity. Chadwick commented on another version of this work, saying: ‘The oval locket of a cranium is opened to reveal an amatory vanitas more vital than the traditional melancholic emblem of mortality, the skull’ (R. Howard & T. McEvilley, De light: Helen Chadwick, Philadelphia 1991, p.14).

The nature of her work meant that Chadwick found much of her subject matter in hospitals. She made a series of photographic works of embryos in hospitals towards the end of her life; it is thought that this may have been where she contracted the virus which caused her sudden death, killing her at the age of just forty-two.

This text was first published in Facing the World: Self Portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei (2016)