Piss Flowers are a group of bronze sculptures – enamelled white to imitate plaster – that resemble flowers. The making of the sculptures however, required the strategic use of the other material invoked in their name. Piss Flowers is considered to be one of Helen Chadwick’s most important sculptural works. They were shown at the Serpentine Gallery in 1994 as part of a solo exhibition titled, tellingly, Effluvia.

During a residency at the Banff Arts Centre, Canada in 1991, Chadwick and her partner David Notarius made daily visits to snowbound locations. There they would place a flower-shaped metal mould onto a mound of snow, taking turns to urinate into it. They then poured plaster into the shapes created. From these casts, bronze versions were made and mounted onto pedestals resembling bulbs. The downward path of the hot urine through snow is inverted to form a flower reaching upwards. Crucially the work also inverts a gendered symbolism, for it is Chadwick’s urination that yields the phallic pistil at the centre of each Piss Flower.

The artist saw these works as romantic insofar as they are a “metaphysical conceit for the union of two people expressing themselves bodily.” Piss Flowers are at once repulsive as they are beautiful, and it is this combination that typifies Chadwick’s work – aesthetic beauty created out of an alliance of unconventional, often vile materials.