I.

A mother with her baby child, dominated by the colours gold, red and blue, and a rectangular format with a triangular top reminiscent of an altarpiece- at first glance an image employing the conventional iconography of the Madonna and Child. This might seem to be an unusual topic for a contemporary artist to pursue, but One Flesh 1985 [fig. 1] by Helen Chadwick (1953-1996) is standing in a tradition of a number of artworks of the 20th century employing or addressing Christian religious imagery.

A random and incomplete selection to underline this point would bring together Edvard Munch's Madonna (1895-1902), Max Ernst's Virgin Chastising the Christ Child (1926), Francis Bacon's Crucifixion (1965), Monica Sjoo's God giving Birth (1969), Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987), Cindy Sherman's Untitled #216 (1989) or Kiki Smith's sculpture Virgin Mary (1992). The singer Madonna who provocatively evokes Roman Catholic imagery in her persona and videos serves as an example from popular culture of the eighties and nineties to round off this enumeration. Some of these images are singular explorations into the field of religious imagery, some reflect an ongoing involvement, others are just using the types as stock characters to explore representational problems. Together they convey an idea of the multitude of reasons and intentions behind the use of Christian imagery in the twentieth century.

In this essay I will focus on Helen Chadwick's One Flesh and discuss it in relation to its position in Chadwick's oeuvre, to show how certain themes remained of interest to her. I will furthermore briefly contrast it to Cindy Sherman's Untitled #216, 1989 in order to map out the main areas of interest for Chadwick and to distinguish the underlying assumptions of these apparently very similar images. The importance of Frida Kahlo's work for Chadwick and a brief discussion of the medium of One Flesh will round of the analysis of this multilayered work. This might then allow me to draw conclusions to account for one aspect that is of interest when a contemporary artist employs elements of Christian iconography, which is in Chadwick's case a deep interest in the psychic states of motherhood, the mother child relationship and how this might be represented using religious iconography as a starting point.

II.

One Flesh (160 x 107 cm), 1984, Victoria and Albert Museum, [fig. 1] is a very unusual kind of Mother and Child image, and apart from my introductory remarks, which are dominant enough to allow a reading in terms of religious iconography, just about everything else differs from usual pictorial conventions. In the following I am going to analyse a number of these intriguing details, drawing on Helen Chadwick's fascinating account of its conception in an unpublished interview with Mark Haworth-Booth. I will also use arguments of Marina Warner, Leo Steinberg, Caroline W. Bynum and especially Julia Kristeva and my own observations from two visits to the V&A.

The mother's right hand is pointing to the sex of the child which is female, whilst the other is cutting the umbilical cord which already dangles loosely from the child's belly button. The other end is still connected to the placenta, which floats like a "somatic and profane halo" over the mother's head. Chadwick calls it an "uncanny object", which forms a kind of "biological trinity" together with mother and child. It is dividing the blue background of the main part of the picture and leading the eye to the smaller golden area, where a vagina, pierced with jewellery occupies the very top, "taking up the usual lofty position of a cherub or perhaps an allegorical sun and moon." [fig. 2] At the bottom of the picture a dark-brown, wooden prayer bench limits the pictorial space on which two knitted baby shoes form another eye catcher, which is, similarly to the vagina, at first difficult to identify. [fig. 3]

The mother is clad in a luxurious bright red cape, elements of lace around the face, and the jewellery she wears all convey a baroque richness and abundance and an emphasis on ornamental, decorative elements. This is also reflected in the green piece of wallpaper that covers the lower right hand area. Thus the iconography of two facets of the persona of the virgin is evoked, that of Maria Regina, the heavenly queen emphasised by the majestic aspect of the expensive colours and materials and the character of official display and that of Maria Lactans, the breast-feeding nurturing mother.

III.

In the interview with Mark Haworth-Booth Helen Chadwick vividly recounts the genesis of One Flesh, which she planned after her neighbour and friend Paula had invited her in 1984 to be present at the birth of her second child "to help work the baby into the world." She experienced this as an "absolutely ineffable moment you can't discuss rationally, it's just something you witness".

She had intended to make a work about the birth and planned to create a Mother and Child piece where she wanted to "weave in a Belliniesque, sublime, maternal moment with corporeal reality. Everything should be as true to life as possible." Thus "automatically the baby would need a penis" and Chadwick claims to have been "absolutely astonished that fate had delivered this sort of a blow contrary to expectations [...], a very implicit concealed feminist trap", which leads her to conclude that "it is far better that Paula holds a baby which obviously isn't Christ and points to the sex of the Child."

The emphasis on the child's sex in a Virgin and Child piece is not in itself some outrageously radical contemporary gesture, but as Leo Steinberg shows in his Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion subject of a considerable amount of religious imagery dating from the fourteenth through to the sixteenth century. He argues that this ostentatio genitalium, the display of genitalia which he establishes as a similar convention to the ostentatio vulnerum, the display of the wounds of the crucifixion, serves the function to emphasise the humanation of god, his incarnation or in other words enfleshing

(which of course is the title of Chadwick's publication where One Flesh is used as a frontispiece). This humanation encompassed all aspects, also and especially that of sexuality, to prove that Christ, who was chaste throughout his life was achieving this under the same physical conditions and subject to the same temptations as every ordinary man.

But Caroline W. Bynum extends and challenges Steinberg's view with respect to late medieval texts and representations which conceive of Jesus' body as lactating and giving birth, thus challenging the dichotomy of gender, that a modern reader might have in mind. She draws attention to medieval mysticism where gender boundaries are not as fixed as in modern understanding and that an emphasis on genitalia in late medieval imagery does not necessarily have to have the same connotations as today.

This shows that what appears as a radical contemporary gesture is often located in a precedent of some sort in the tradition of pictorial representation.

IV.

If the gesture of the right hand opens up this entire field of representational problems alluding to a rich art historical tradition the action of the left hand is equally complex. The cutting of the umbilical cord by the mother is a highly constructed, symbolic moment, less concerned with questions of religious representation, rather addressing questions of motherhood and the mother child relationship. Analogous to Steinberg's ostentatio genitalium, this makes for an ostentatio partum.

One seminal and much interpreted work about this topic is Mary Kelly's Post Partum Document (1973-9) accounting for the psychic states of mother and child in the early years. Drawing on Lacanian theory and avoiding any conventional figurative representations of the body this might be regarded as an oppositional approach to the one Chadwick has always pursued. Rather than engaging in an intellectualised abstraction Chadwick's described her aim throughout her work as to "lure the viewer into the space of the work" something which, together with the frequent display of her naked body, she has been heavily criticised for by parts of the feminist movement.

One thinker who had great influence on Chadwick was Julia Kristeva, with her attempt to account for motherhood and its complexities, stating the "massive nothing" that Freud offers on this point and challenging and expanding Lacanian concepts. In 'Stabat Mater', that essay about the cult of the Virgin Mary and motherhood which seems most directly relevant to One Flesh, Kristeva breaks up the main text with parallel personal records of her own experience of pregnancy, birth and being a mother. These sometimes very poetic accounts underline the concerns which she had begun formulating in her earlier 'Motherhood according to Bellini'.

There she challenges the constraints that the two dominant discourses of science on the one hand and Christian theology on the other create relating to the subject in the maternal experience. The former completely neglects the maternal subject, while the latter defines maternity as an "impossible elsewhere, a sacred beyond", establishing "a sort of subject at the point where the subject and its speech split apart, fragment and vanish." This reflects for example in annunciation and dormition of the virgin, at both times she is confined to silence. These aspects are addressed in One Flesh in the choice of the official attire but also in the closed eyes of the mother and the fragmented nature of the body due to the collage.

However, Kristeva argues, apart from these extreme poles of science and spirituality, at some point the mother is acknowledged to be the master of the process of gestation if only in order to guarantee symbolic coherence. Thus a 'phallic' mother is assumed, in order for every speaker not to conceive their being in relation to a void, a nothingness. But to maintain the social symbolic linguistic contract of the group this acknowledgement of subjecthood of the mother is at the same time denied. The result leaves the maternal body as "the place of a splitting which remains a constant factor in social reality." This conflict, as I shall argue, is one aspect that Chadwick addresses in One Flesh.

The psychoanalytic discourse of analysis assumes the desire for motherhood to be anchored within the paternal symbolic order regarding it either as a transformation of penis envy or anal drive. But, Kristeva proceeds, "motherhood seems to be impelled also by a nonsymbolic, nonpaternal causality.[...] How can we verbalise this prelinguistic, unrepresentable memory?" Or accordingly with reference to artistic practice, how can we visualise it?

In the personal accounts included in 'Stabat Mater' Kristeva writes

There is him[...], his own flesh, which was mine yesterday. Then there is this other abyss that opens up between the body and what had been inside: there is the abyss between the mother and the child. What connection is there between myself [...] and this internal graft and fold, which, once the umbilical cord has been severed, is an inaccessible other? My body and ... him. No connection. [...] The child, whether he or she is irremediably an other.

Thus she focuses on the experience of division and separation, after the pregnancy as an experience of unity and 'one-fleshness' that state that is difficult to verbalise.

In One Flesh the moment of separation is re-staged, re-presented to draw attention to an assumed prior unity. The cutting of the umbilical cord and the fragmented nature of the piece conveys a unity at the point of splitting which is still alluded to in the title.

One Flesh seems to stage the moment where the symbolic paternal facet of motherhood takes over, where it starts to be nameable and representable, therefore the use of readable iconography, firmly anchored in tradition. This paternal facet "turns into melancholy as soon as the child becomes an object, [...] destined to be a subject, an other." But by choosing to attempt to depict the moment where this happens, Chadwick is pushing the boundaries and starting to create a visual language that begins to account for these unnameable processes. It is also the mother herself who performs the separation, as if to regain control over this facet of maternity- a gesture contrary to common practice in hospitals nowadays, where the father is often invited to cut the umbilical cord to integrate him into the birth process.

V.

A detailed discussion of her later work Lofos Nymphon, 1987 [fig. 4] would exceed the boundaries of this essay, but I would briefly like to refer to it to point out how deeply she embraced these themes and continued to pursue them. Lofos Nymphon is a biographical work addressing the mother daughter relationship with respect to its 'homosexual facets'.

In One Flesh the mother of the mother is alluded to only in a coded but as I think still prominent way. On the brown wooden prayer bench Chadwick placed to baby shoes [fig. 4], of the kind that grandmothers would knit for their

grandchildren. Thus via a piece of handiwork Chadwick subtly establishes a link to a matrilineal genealogy almost citing a version of Anna Selbdritt, the convention of representation that shows Mary holding Jesus on the lap of her mother Anna, only that of course in One Flesh also the baby is female.

At this point it seems also useful to turn to another text of great influence on Chadwick. Although published after the conception of One Flesh it seems to have struck Chadwick as expressing many valid thoughts she found stimulating. 'Foetal Images: the Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction' discusses the power of visual imagery over society's understanding of pregnancy and the fundamental shift in perception from pregnancy as an interior experience to a visible exterior one taking place on the monitor of the ultrasound scan. The possible devaluation of the mother's 'subjecthood' is pointed out and how forceful the idea of the foetus as a self-sufficient entity has become in public consciousness, so that unborns are regarded as 'patients' with personal needs and rights. Visually the foetus is perceived as 'man in space'- though connected to the spaceship (mother) via 'umbilical cord' still fully functional and self-sufficient. The staged separation of mother and child in One Flesh and the title suggest a perception contrary to this.

VI.

It seems as if Chadwick was approaching the pictorial epitomes of both discourses that Kristeva cites for the insufficient account of motherhood, theology and science, visually addresses them and works from there on towards a new aesthetics of maternity. In One Flesh she takes from religion the altarpiece and in Unnatural Selection 1996 [fig. 5] from science the image of the microscopic fertilised egg.

In Unnatural Selection she is experimenting with the ambivalent state of fertilised eggs that literally remain as superfluous 'rubbish' in the process of In

Vitro Fertilisation (IVF). They are presented like precious jewels and the title of the one depicted here, Monstrance [Fig. 5] also refers to Christianity, since that is the name for the shrine of the host presented to the community on special feast days.

This highly complex piece also addresses the mother as the site of reproduction, this time however, she really is absent, and the images gained with technical apparatus do not present a distortion. The title of this work could be understood as a value judgement, emphasising the unnaturalness of the process but it is probably more of a statement, for Chadwick is in no way taking a political or socially critical position towards the process. She remains subtle with a perception of the complexities underlying these issues and a strong eye for the beauty of the shapes and textures.

VII.

After this focus on the intrinsic arguments in One Flesh and the extension of ideas in other work by Chadwick I will now briefly look at an exploration of the Virgin Mary by a contemporary artist, Cindy Sherman's Untitled #216 [fig. 6] in order to be able to pinpoint more specifically Chadwick's concerns. Sherman (b. 1954) is an artist whose work Chadwick appreciated very much, describing it as "extremely powerful".

There are a number of striking similarities between One Flesh and Untitled #216. The breast in both images seems almost dislocated from the body, as if the nurturing aspect was fetishised. The lace pattern dominating the background in #216 is reminiscent of the piece of wall covering in One Flesh. Both Madonnas have their eyes cast down and withhold the gaze.

However, Sherman and Chadwick take quite different approaches to the same topic. Chadwick uses the familiar iconography for explorations of maternal experiences and subjecthood whereas Sherman is more broadly interested in modes of representation, the history of images and their effect today.

Untitled #216 is part of Sherman's 'history portraits' series, where the artist posed as characters from a whole range of classic old masterpieces in order to explore art historical conventions of representation. This example belongs even more obviously to the pictorial category of Maria Regina than Chadwick's piece. There are two other Madonna's in the history portraits, Untitled #223, 1990 [fig. 7] and Untitled #225, 1990 [fig. 8] in a total of 35 images. Sherman stated that "all women in these paintings have been the wives or lovers of the artists or the wives of rich patrons". Untitled #216 is based upon Fouquet's Madonna of Melun, 1450 [fig. 9], who depicted Agnès Sorel the mistress of Charles VII of France. Thus Sherman clearly has a concept behind these images, and that is the relationship of women as subjects in relation to 'high' art, which is defined by their relation to men. The Madonna serves as the epitome of woman defined in relation to man: the mother of the male incarnation of god. Untitled #216 is therefore less about the sensations around motherhood but more about politics of representing women.

VIII.

Another artist whose work proves useful for an investigation of Chadwick's art is the Mexican Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). The film Chadwick made for the BBC series Artists Journeys is an intriguing document revealing the dense network of references that exist between Kahlo's and Chadwick's work. Visually the umbilical cord and the surgeon's scissors the mother holds in One Flesh are reminiscent of some of the more traumatic works by Frida Kahlo- dealing with miscarriages, operations and abortions, as for example in The Two Fridas, 1939. [Fig. 10] I can only mention this here without further discussion to convey an idea of the complex influence Kahlo's work must have had on Chadwick.

In the film Chadwick at length discusses Frida Kahlo's My Nurse and I, 1937, [fig. 11] as one of her "favourite pictures". She emphasises its tenderness and then states:

I'm sure she was aware of the irony of her body standing in for Christ. It reminds me of the way Renaissance painters display Jesus against the breast of the Virgin.

This offers a number of interesting parallels to One Flesh, most significantly because it is also a girl that is being breast fed. It is less explicitly citing Christian iconography than One Flesh but also most powerfully addressing questions of motherhood, unity and separation. This is not a mother child relationship depicted, but a surrogate mother, a nurse; thus the picture is focusing strongly on the nutritional aspect, also in the schematised interior vision of the one breast. The nurses face is hidden behind a mask, denying the gaze once more, underlining the remoteness in the relationship.

The film opens up with Chadwick building an offering table following a Mexican tradition to evoke the spirit of the dead artist, before she sets of to Mexico to visit those places where Kahlo lived and worked. This is a very sensual scene involving a cornucopia of fruit, flowers, objects Kahlo enjoyed, such as cigarettes or lipsticks. One of the first elements the viewer beholds is the completion of a cake which is formed as a skull- Chadwick finishing the writing of Frida's name in coloured icing, licking the remains from her fingers.

This leads me to a detail in One Flesh which I have not mentioned so far, and which adds a further interesting twist to the elements involved in the visual language of this picture. In the lower right hand corner, placed before the green wallpaper and bordering on the brown 'prayer bench' Chadwick inserted a little skull positioned as if it was looking out of the picture. A skull in itself might be regarded as a simple memento mori but the toad like creature perching on top of it definitely exceeds all well known allegories of this kind. [fig. 12] This detail is easily overlooked, hidden in its camouflage of decoration and I only discovered it after I had spent quite a while with the piece, intrigued by the minute details I had not been able to make out before in the reproduction. I had not found this unusual couple mentioned in any of the literature I consulted nor did Chadwick refer to it in her discussion of One Flesh in the interview. When I pointed it out to Mark Haworth-Booth, Curator of Photographs at the V&A, he shared my surprise upon its existence.

I would suggest it serves two functions which relate closely to each other. The first one would be to add a twist to the far reaching complicated issues addressed in this piece, as I have discussed above about motherhood, subjecthood and birth. A skull is the ultimate reminder of death in numerous vanitas depictions- and maybe in parts it also functions as such here. However, it is not a grim reaper, more an ironic companion and sardonic guardian, similarly to the skull in the tableaux for Frida Kahlo. It appears like a jack-in-the-box, a reminder of death with a sinister sense of humour as if to remind the beholder not to take everything too seriously. This little detail is inserted into a 'serious' artwork, dealing with questions of moral, religion and visual traditions. It is breaking up, twisting and adding an edge to things in the same way as the contrast that a collage of photocopies poses to a heavy golden frame.

The second function which complements the first is more profane, more speculative and more referring to the artist's intentions, admittedly shaky ground, but I would nevertheless like to mention my supposition. The skull to me looks a bit like a sinister children's toy, more funny than surreal and threatening. From what I have gathered about her personality in the literature available and from the way she talks in the interview Chadwick seems to have had an excellent sense of humour, beside her serious dedication and commitment to the intellectual side of her work. I could imagine her adding this detail with a certain sense of impish pleasure, a little bonus to discover for the diligent viewer. And in a way she has laid out some 'false traces' as well, for example with the baby shoes [fig. 4], which are at first difficult to recognise. Another significantly indistinct detail would be the vagina [fig. 3], which is difficult to decipher because of the metalwork. These areas in the picture almost lead away the attention from the little skull. Of course I am not sure about her intentions but I think it is at least possible to read this also on a rather humorous level.

IX.

Before I come to a conclusion I would briefly mention one or two thoughts about the medium of One Flesh which is a collage of colour-photocopies, in some parts consisting of very small fragments. It was conceptualised contemporary to Chadwick's major work of the mid eighties, the installation Of Mutability 1984-86 which includes the Oval Court [Fig. 12] her other work where she masterfully turned the photocopier into an artistic medium.

The act of photocopying for Chadwick involves two major aspects, "control and intimacy". The photocopier could be regarded as complementing and juxtaposing the camera in a way that involves different characteristics than the camera. Whereas the optics of the camera capture a supposed entirety of an object or a body the photocopier is less like human vision. In the process of acquiring the image the physicality of the depicted object is involved in a more direct way, it is rather the object that is being placed and positioned leaving traces of its presence, than the freedom of vantage point the camera allows. The intimacy of the act of photocopying, be it the actual handling of dead or living animals for Oval Court or the positioning of human body parts on the machine involves a greater sensuality than the act of photographing. The fragmented result forces the artist to build up the body anew, almost more like a sculptor than a photographer. And of course, the photocopies, at least for the time being, are even more delicate and perishable than a photographic print.

X.

I have started this essay acknowledging the multitude of reasons behind the use of religious imagery in the work of a number of different artists in the twentieth century. Some of these are concerned with the underlying question of how motherhood can be accounted for and represented and I have used Helen Chadwick's One Flesh as a dominant representative for this example. One Flesh uses the power and visual tradition of the iconography of the Virgin to account for experiences on an intimate psychological and sensual level, staging the moment of separation as a crucial point from where to start negotiating visual representations of the "nonsymbolic, nonpaternal causalities of motherhood". Although Chadwick regarded One Flesh as unique in her oeuvre, works like Lofos Nymphon, (1987), Blood Hyphen (1988), or Unnatural Selection (1996) prove the persistence with which she went on pursuing questions around maternity and constantly attempted to push the boundaries.

I have cited other artists who use Catholic religious imagery, to complement and illuminate the points I raised around Chadwick. Cindy Sherman's history portraits Untitled #216, #223, #225 for example show a different focus and approach where the artist is interested in art historical traditions and politics of representation with respect to gender roles. Frida Kahlo's My Nurse and I serves as a more personal, biographical exploration of similar questions as Chadwick and Sherman; her use of Christian Iconography, however is less accentuated and direct. I hope that this essay has conveyed an idea of the multilayered, complex net of meanings that One Flesh consists of, which makes it such a fascinating work of art.


© Elisabeth Herles, April 1997

List of Illustrations

1. Helen Chadwick: One Flesh, 1985, Photocopies, 160 x 107 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

2. Helen Chadwick: One Flesh (detail) 1985, Photocopies, 160 x 107 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

3. Helen Chadwick: One Flesh (detail) 1985, Photocopies, 160 x 107 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

4. Helen Chadwick: Lofos Nymphon, 'I: West, Asteroskopeion', 1987, Oil on Linen, plywood, slide projection, 160 x 122 x 7 cm.

5. Helen Chadwick: Unnatural Selection: 'Monstrance'', 1996, Iris print, perspex, 115 x 56 x 8 cm.

6. Cindy Sherman: Untitled #216, 1989, Kodak C-print, 221 x 142 cm.

7. Cindy Sherman: Untitled #223, 1990, Kodak C-print, 147 x 106 cm.

8. Cindy Sherman: Untitled #225, 1990, Kodak C-print, 122 x 84 cm.

9. Jean Fouquet: Madonna of Melun, Diptych (detail), 1450, Oil on Canvas, Antwerp.

10. Frida Kahlo: The Two Fridas, 1939, Oil on Canvas, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City.

11. Frida Kahlo: My Nurse and I, 1937, Oil on Metal, 29.5 x 34.5 cm, Sra. Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

12. Helen Chadwick: One Flesh (detail) 1985, Photocopies, 160 x 107 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

13. Helen Chadwick: Of Mutability: Oval Court (detail) 1984-1986, Photocopies, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Bibliography

Books and Articles:

Betterton, R. An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body Routledge, London and New York, 1996.

Bynum, C.W. 'The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg' in: Renaissance Quarterly Vol. XXXIX, No. 3, Autumn 1986, pp. 399-439.

Chadwick, H. Enfleshings (with an essay by Marina Warner), Secker&Warburg, London, 1989.

Chadwick, H. Effluvia (Exhibition Catalogue: Museum Folkwang, Essen; Fundació "la Caixa" Barcelona; Serpentine Gallery, London) with the essay 'A Purpose in Liquidity' by M. Allthorpe-Guyton, 1994.

Chadwick, W. Women, Art, and Society Thames and Hudson, London, 1990.

Chalmers, G. (Ed.) Stilled Lives Helen Chadwick (with essays by M. Warner, L. Buck, D.A. Mellor) Edinburgh, 1996.

Danto, A.C. Cindy Sherman: History Portraits Rizzoli, New York, 1991.

Kelly, M. Post Partum Document Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley, 1983.

Krauss, R. (with an essay by N. Bryson) Cindy Sherman 1975-1993 Rizzoli, New York, 1993.

Kristeva, J. 'Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini' (1977) in: Desire in Language, A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Ed.) L. S. Roudiez, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1984, pp. 237-270.

Kristeva, J. 'Stabat Mater' in: The Kristeva Reader (Ed.) T. Moi, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986, pp. 161-186.

Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror, An Essay on Abjection Columbia University Press, New York, 1982.

Mellor, D.A. 'From the Carnal to the Virtual Body' in: Art and Design, Profile No. 44, 1995, pp. 88-95.

Petchesky, R.P. 'Foetal Images: the Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction' in: Reproductive Technologies, Gender, Motherhood and Medicine Polity Press, Oxford, 1987, pp. 57-80.

Schneider, C. Cindy Sherman 'History Portraits', Die Wiedergeburt des Gemäldes nach dem Ende der Malerei Schirmer Mosel, München, Paris London, 1995.

Steinberg, L. The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion Pantheon/October, New York, 1983.

Warner, M. Alone of All Her Sex, The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1976.

Films and Interviews:

Interview of Helen Chadwick by Mark Haworth-Booth for the Oral History of British Photography (division of the British Library) from August 1994. Four tapes in the National Sound Archive, London. Extracts published in Chalmers, G. (Ed.) Stilled Lives Helen Chadwick.

Artist's Journeys: Chadwick on Kahlo BBC 2 (45 min) Dir. C. Swayne, 1992.

Cindy Sherman, Nobody's here but me BBC, Arena (50 min), Dir. M. Stokes, 1994.

Helen Chadwick Of Mutability ICA Television Productions for Channel 4, (27 min) Dir. C. Rawlence, 1987.