Who Was Helen Chadwick, and Why Was She So Important?

Helen Chadwick was obsessed with the restless, fleeting vestiges of things and feelings that had vanished—what she called “fugitive traces.” Her huge breadth of multimedia installations bloomed out of the effort to examine the ephemera of life. “Chadwick is capturing the fugitive not in a spirit of grief or censure, but in celebration,” her friend Marina Warner wrote in a 1989 essay. Chadwick is now the subject of the largest-ever retrospective of her career, at the