Anatoli
Anatoli depicts an abstracted landscape with a rocky mountaintop, below a cell-like sun and against a swirling sky backdrop. Chadwick has superimposed fragments of cellular imagery in white flesh-like colours with a photograph of a yellow light bulb in the centre of a sun to create the focal point of the composition. The limited edition print is named after the Greek town of her mother’s birthplace. The print is compositionally and conceptually similar to Chadwick’s Viral Landscapes and Meat Abstracts, both created in the same year. In 1988 Chadwick made the decision to move away from the overt depiction of her body and refocused her work on the body’s interior to look at flesh, fluids, microscopic cells, and atoms. She relocated her explorations of the boundary between self and the world away from the physical body and towards her growing knowledge of micro-biology that expanded her ideas on non-binary subjectivity and she began to see the cell and self on a continuum. Anatoli, as with Viral Lanscapes, was created at the height of the AIDS epidemic when Chadwick became preoccupied with examining the idea of viral infection. These works expressed her ideas about the body as continuous with nature.
Anatoli was created as a commission for the King’s Fund Hospital Project which was displayed in Great Ormond Street Hospital. This project included a series of limited edition prints by six artists, selected by art historian and curator Richard Cork, including Richard Long, Anish Kapoor, and Bruce McLean, alongside Helen Chadwick for sale to NHS hospitals. The King’s Fund Hospital Project sought to encourage widespread use of the arts in hospital settings.