Loop My Loop.
|
Title |
Loop My Loop. |
|
Alternative Title |
Loop my Loop. |
|
Creator |
Chadwick, Helen (English sculptor, photographer, and installation artist, 1953-1996) |
|
Date |
1991 |
|
Cultural Context |
English
British
European |
|
Style/Period |
Postmodern
Contemporary |
|
Subject |
Mixed media
Allusions
Symbols
Hair
Body parts |
|
Description |
"In the decade before her premature death in 1996, Chadwick developed an iconography which has links with the thought of Georges Bataille […] In Nostalgie de la Boue (1990) two rounded cibachrome transparencies were hung one above the other. The top one contained a ring of earthworms, the bottom somebody's scalp, its center imploding so that it vaguely resembled an anus. Distinctions upholding the human above the animal (or insectoid) no longer held. However, Chadwick made such transgressions playful, celebratory." (Caption, p.227); "Although nothing directly comparable could be found in Europe, the British artist Helen Chadwick echoed American concerns with the body's integrity and boundaries. Chadwick came to prominence in 1986 with the installation Of Mutability at London's ICA. Its main component was the 'Oval Court', a low, centrally-placed platform on which blue photocopies of parts of Chadwick's body, animal cadavers, and vegetable matter were jigsawed together to produce a representation of a 'pool' containing floating and swimming bodies. Chadwick made complex allusions to 'vanitas' emblems and Baroque iconography, showing herself, in multiple emanations, engaged in a sensual immersion in nature's cycles of fruition and decay. By the early 1990s she was producing works such as Loop My Loop, a back-lit cibachrome photograph of a sow's intestines intertwined with braids of blonde hair. Such works challenged conventional dualisms such as bestial and human, base and ideal, body and mind. Ultimately, the body's internal economy superseded the external, consumer-driven one. The impulse was perhaps solipsistic, or narcissistic, but it answered a yearning for experiential authenticity in the face of an increasingly mediated reality." (Excerpt, p.228) |
|
Material |
Mixed media
Hair
Human hair
Intestine
Organ (animal material)
Animal material |
|
Technique |
Cibachrome (TM)
Photography
Backlighting
Directional lighting
Photographic processes
Photographic techniques |
|
Work Type |
Mixed media
Sculpture
Photographs |
|
Source |
Hopkins, David. After Modern Art: 1945-2000. Oxford History of Art. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2000. (p.227, fig.121) |
|
Rights |
Photograph reproduced in Hopkins courtesy: Zelda Cheatle Gallery. © The estate of Helen Chadwick. |
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Digital Publisher |
University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center |
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Format |
image/jpeg |
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Digital File Name |
VRC 827-09.jpg |
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Rating |
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