In the mid 1980s, British artist Helen Chadwick began shifting away from the pointedly feminist sculptures and performances of her early career towards a more autobiographical practice. This elegiac photograph is from her t0-part series The Labours, which sees the artist standing alongside ten laminated plywood sculptures—from a pram to a piano—each bearing her image and representing a moment from her youth. “[It was] a way of trying to define the past, so that I could then use this as a springboard into something else,” Chadwick explained “[It’s] very classical in its philosophy in that self is reduced to ten supposedly immutable forms which represent the pattern of growth.”
