Helen Chadwick, who died in 1996, was a delightful person and a wonderful artist, but her influential work is neither as well-known nor as feted as it deserves to be. The Barbican Art Gallery mounted a tremendous retrospective in 2004, alongside which we produced our film The Art of Helen Chadwick. Now, to extend further the awareness and understanding of her art, Leeds Museums & Galleries and the Henry Moore Institute Archive have begun to put her notebooks online. They've used Turning the Pages software, which allows you to simulate paging through these yellowing exercise-books. The experience of running your fingers, at least virtually, over their names and ideas and measurements is both intimate and oddly compelling.
The notebooks were gifted to the Henry Moore Institute Archive by the Helen Chadwick Estate in 2002-03. And it's inspired idea to put them online with Turning the Pages 2.0, which was developed by The British Library and Armadillo Systems. TTP 2.0 runs on both Windows machines and Macs and requires nothing more than a broadband connection and a free download. And to find the notebooks (which don't have an obvious unique url), go to The Henry Moore Foundation, then the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, then 'archive' -- and Turning the Pages is in the left-hand menu.
TTP 2.0 provides high resolution, zoomable images of each opening of a book. But the killer is the way the software allows you to stroke the mouse over a page and see it do a pretty convincing 3D simulation of being turned over. As a consequence, the system retains many of the qualities of working with books as material objects. And for other examples, take a look at The British Library's terrific range of volumes available in this form, including leaves from the Luttrell Psalter, Jane Austen's hand-written History of England, the Sforza Hours and the Diamond Sutra, printed in China in 868.
There are three of Helen Chadwick's notebooks available at present, and it's planned that more will be added. Two are from the time when she was a student, from 1972 to 1978, and the third, written around 1980, relates to an early installation with sound called Model Institution, which was concerned with unemployment.This one has a good deal of practical stuff relating to suppliers but there are also many notes of possible dialogue lines, invented or perhaps overheard -- lines from what one note describes as 'soliloquies of pain'.
The earliest of the notebooks, written between May 1972 (when Helen Chadwick was 19) and 1975, is crammed with the thoughts and notions of a precocious student -- and indeed seems to have been used as part of her (unsuccessful) application to the Royal College of Art. A fragment of the archive's catalogue entry for this book gives some sense of the artist's interests at the time
ideas for self portraits; lists of types of angels, devils, kinds of divination, metamorphosis and Ovid; ideas for an 'alice box'; ... notes on the 'willy heart' and 'shield'; notes on 'my death cult' relating to a 'face death mask' and 'burial objects'; notes on 'Pyramid - eternal triangle: the sacred and the profane' (later known as the 'Curse sculpture') including a list of objects made for the work and diagrams working out its dimensions; notes on 'quilting' and 'hair'; notes relating to a death mask; list of different bras; ... research notes on 'mirror: reflection worlds', 'Aphrodite', 'Evil eye', 'sympathetic magic', 'sweets', children, 'medieval studies'
The Jorge Luis Borges of Labyrinths would have been thrilled by such a list. And as for the first item in this extract, self portraits, both the list and the notebooks taken together make their contribution.
The other student notebook was written between March 1975 and (probably) 1978. Here you can witness her working out the ideas behind her performances at Brighton Polytechnic. One of the best-known was called Domestic Sanitation, but a line here suggests that she thought of titling it Erotic Sanitation. Along with notes about latex clothing and suppliers of flower dyes, there are neatly-written ideas from books she was studying, including (see above) John Berger's Ways of Seeing.
Helen Chadwick's gallery works were always immaculately finished, as perfect as she could make them. Whereas these notebooks are scrappy and messy and, in the nicest way, all over the place. Which of course makes them all the more interesting and engaging and revealing. Roll on the next release.