Helen Chadwick’s series, Meat Abstracts, comprises eight large-scale Polaroid photographs made in 1989 at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London during the exhibition "Photography Now, 1989". Using a 20x24-inch Polaroid camera, Chadwick produced highly detailed images that examine complex arrangements of raw meat and internal organs positioned on a variety of materials including textiles, leather, and ornamental panels.
Shifting away from earlier self-representational works, she began exploring bodily identity through universal and metaphorical forms. Meat Abstracts extends this shift by turning inward—examining flesh as material, and addressing the function, form, and symbolic fetishization of the body. Through meticulous arrangements, Chadwick draws on art-historical traditions, particularly still-life and Vanitas painting—a 17th-century Dutch genre featuring symbolic objects such as skulls and rotting fruit to reflect on death and the fleeting nature of life. The work also implicitly addresses broader societal conversations around the ethics of meat consumption and bodily vulnerability.
Aesthetically, the careful integration of textiles, from silks to velvet, serves to soften the visual harshness of raw flesh, creating a paradoxical blend of attraction and repulsion. The use of rich, saturated color Polaroid film accentuates textural details and produces a slick, almost wet appearance, intensified by strategically placed internal lighting from single bulbs within the frame.
Chadwick’s compositions emphasized the raw materiality of flesh, reinforcing the tension between beauty and decay. This interplay of sensory allure and visceral discomfort shaped the critical reception of the work, which was noted for both its formal inventiveness and its provocative challenge to aesthetic and cultural norms.
