I don’t remember when I first saw Helen Chadwick’s Viral Landscapes – I suspect I went to the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford and saw them there in 1989 – but I do know that I have never forgotten them.  

I think there were only five of these extraordinary pictures in the series, although I surprise myself now by finding what seem to be variants online.  They were exhibited in a long straight line without any space between the frames, and the effect they had was very strong.  They came from an artist’s residency Chadwick had won on the Pembrokeshire coast, and they combined so many things that have become commonplace since.  That they were somehow medical is obvious from the title; they were rooted in the fear of HIV.  As always with Chadwick, the process that underlay them was far more meticulous and far more formally researched than the apparent violence of the surface suggests.  She wrote pages of notes on what she was trying to achieve, and arrived at her results by a meticulous (and very scientific) staircase of small changes based on previous results. I believe I read somewhere that she even posed herself on the shore in postures from Old Master paintings to more properly match her body to the developing pictures she was making. 

To arrive at the painted parts of the picture, Chadwick spread paint on the water and ‘harvested’ it on canvas a bit in the manner of marbling paper; she used photographs of cells from her own body (hence the long thin shape of a microscope slide).  She made the landscape elements with that very steep curve of the horizon to remind us that the self is made of cells – little round tight balls of surface tension.  And she bound the lot together using early computer programmes: the whole a process perfectly blending scientific practice and artistic.   

To my eye, the Viral Landscapes take their place in several different families of imagery.  They’re autobiographical in some oblique but important way; they’re plainly scientific; they are specifically to do with the environment and a sustainable human relationship with it, questioning our place in the world; they belong with that marriage of technique and delight in the natural world that drives people like Susan Derges; they have their place in the (related) list of sea-scapes made orderly by technique, ranging from Turner through the mighty Atlantic headlands of Thomas Joshua Cooper or the featureless wastes of Hiroshi Sugimoto.  In my own personal mental collection, they come very close to the lovely painted Cibachromes David Buckland made of the headlands in Dorset where he learnt to push his kayak beyond safety.

Helen Chadwick died absurdly young in 1996.  She had by then been a teacher at Chelsea, the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths, St. Martins.  She was plainly highly influential on those grounds alone.  She was written about by critics of the calibre of Marina Warner, and that in itself is a form of influence. But the generation (shall we lazily tag it the generation of the Young British Artists?) which was directly influenced by seeing her work fresh, in all its sharpness and wit, its anger and self, is itself waning now, and its high time we paid her attention once again to Chadwick.