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| | Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | Vanitas II, Helen Chadwick (1986) |
 | | Chadwick's works range from photographs of fresh meat arranged as lovingly as a 17th-century still life (the camera dwelling on wet, gold-lit compositions of newly butchered flesh), to a series of Viral Landscapes, in which a blotch smears itself across a rocky shore. |
 | | Chadwick is wearing kitschly sensual stuff, including white feathers and gold jewellery, and this is echoed in the pink velvet curtains. |
 | | In this portrait Chadwick revives the sumptuous spatial complexities of 17th-century baroque art and architecture (and its 18th-century parody, rococo) to dramatise the richness of experience, that the self is not simple, that the mind's experience of inhabiting a body is mysterious. |
| www.guardian.co.uk /arts/portrait/story/0,11109,740350,00.html (491 words) |
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