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

During a residency at the Banff Arts Centre, Canada (1991) Chadwick and her partner David Notarius made daily visits to snowbound locations. They placed 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 white pedestals. 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.

Biography

British conceptual artist Helen Chadwick embraced the sensuous aspects of the natural world, breaking taboos of the “normal” and “traditional”. Her influence upon a young generation of British artists was cemented through her teaching posts at the Royal College of Art, Chelsea School of Art and the London Institute. Her experiments with material were innovative and unconventional and captured a world in a state of flux.

Chadwick was one of the first women artists to be nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987. Important solo exhibitions include ‘Wreaths to Pleasure’, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2012); ‘Helen Chadwick: A Retrospective’, Barbican Art Gallery, London (2004), which travelled to the Manchester City Art Gallery, Manchester; Kunstmuseet Trapholt, Kolding, Denmark and Liljevalch Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; and ‘Bad Blooms’, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1995), which travelled to Norrköpings Konstmuseum, Norrköpings, Sweden; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis; and Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala, Sweden. Chadwick’s 1986 exhibition ‘Of Mutability’, which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, is considered a seminal point in the breakthrough of the YBA movement. Chadwick’s work is included in the Arts Council Collection; British Council Collection; Tate Collection; National Portrait Gallery; Victoria & Albert Museum and MoMA New York, amongst many others.