Highly respected by her peers and hugely influential on the subsequent generation of artists, the British artist Helen Chadwick produced a wideranging body of work in a variety of media, which shifted from early institutional and architectural critique to operatic installations, and to photographic projects and sculptures. Stephen Walker looks behind this apparent variety, identifying a consistent range of interests - ranging from classical Greek through to sub-particle physics - that accompanied and supported Chadwick's realised work. Although she enjoyed significant critical attention in her lifetime, this is the first study to explore the rich archive which informed her oeuvre. Critical of the impact that limiting political, philosophical and scientific constructions have on identity, Chadwick's work can offer insights into the relationship between body and space; self and world; art and science; artifice and nature; theory and practice; the creative self and the creative process.
Dismantling and reassembling her ideas, this book combines a close reading of Chadwick's notebooks and research with broader speculation regarding their ongoing relevance for artistic and architectural work today.

Stephen Walker is Reader at The University of Sheffield. He is author of Gordon Matta-Clark: Art, Architecture and the Attack on Modernism (I.B.Tauris, 2009) and is co-editor, with Florian Kossak, Doina Petrescu, Tatjana Schneider and Renata Tyszczuk, of Agency: Working With Uncertain Architectures (2009).

List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgements ix
Preface xi
Integration of Sources xv
Introduction: New negotiations 1
Part One: the creative process and the creative persona
1: the Creative Self
2: the Creative Process and 'Total Pattern'
Part Two: experience, architecture and identity
3: Body and Self
4: 'Multi-Stability' and Viewing Position
Part Three: artifice and nature
5: the Grotto and Architectural Conceit
6: Architecture, the Divinities and the Authority of Science
7: 'Viral Architecture' and the Rapprochement of Art and Science
Part Four: theory and practice
8: Geometry, 'Stereonomy' and Surface
9: the Role of Making
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index