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Artworks
Helen CHADWICK British, 1953-1996
Birth of Barbie, 1993Cibachrome photograph
Unique in size40 x 26 cmBirth of Barbie shows a bright red, blonde-haired Barbie emerging from a lump of raw meat, shaped to look like a vulva. Barbie’s white teeth, peroxide hair and baby blue...Birth of Barbie shows a bright red, blonde-haired Barbie emerging from a lump of raw meat, shaped to look like a vulva.
Barbie’s white teeth, peroxide hair and baby blue eyes glow against a bloody crimson background, her smile and stare full of
Stepford Wife-menace. Chadwick makes an explicit connection between the images of women that contemporary Western
society teaches from an early age are acceptable, and the bodily reality of the reproductive process.Exhibitions
Part 1: Matrescence, Richard Saltoun Gallery London, 15 November - 21 December 2019
Liberties, Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, Penzance, Cornwall, UK, 2017
Bristle: Hair and Hegemony, Drogheda’s Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, Ireland, 2017
Presence, Gimpel Fils, London, 2005Literature
Amber Husain, Meat Love: An ideology of the flesh. Published by MACK, 2023. Illustrated, page 80
Leonie O'Dwyer, Helen Chadwick: a critical catalogue raisonné, Leeds 2012 (illustrated, page 158). Griselda Pollock (ed.),
The Sacred & the Feminine: Imagination & Sexual Difference (New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts), London 2007 (p. ix).
