Her work draws from a range of sources, from myths to science, grappling with a plethora of unconventional, visceral materials that included chocolate, lambs' tongues and rotting vegetable matter.

She recalled, "Traditional media were never dynamic enough… right from early on in art school, I wanted to use the body to create a set of inter-relationships with the audience".

[5] Her degree show Domestic Sanitation (1976) consisted of her and three other women, 'wearing' latex costumes painted directly on to the skin,[5] engaging in a satirical feminist round of cleaning and grooming.

Beck Road became a hive of home studios whose residents included Maureen Paley, Ray Walker and Genesis P-Orridge.

[5] Her rise into the public sphere was marked by the inclusion of her work Ego Geometria Sum (1983) in a group exhibition entitled Summer Show I (1983) at the Serpentine.

[7] Chadwick's work really came to prominence with Of Mutability (1984-86), a large installation involving sculpture and photography at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

This exhibition marked the high point of Chadwick's exposure, receiving widespread critical attention and national press coverage.

In 1995, Chadwick took up an artist residency in the assisted conception unit at King's College Hospital, London, photographing IVF embryos rejected for implantation.

"I was looking at a vocabulary for desire where I was the subject and the object and the author" she said; "I felt by directly taking all these roles, the normal situation in which the viewer operated as a kind of voyeur broke down".

Chadwick commented, "Why do we feel compelled to read gender, and automatically wish to sex the body before us so we can orientate our desire and thus gain pleasure or reject what we see?

[10] Chadwick elaborated her interest in deconstructing gender binaries in a lecture she gave in 1991: "in language dual structures are defined as oppositional: where we have self, there must be other; gender is male or female, and most problematic and absurd of all is the split between mind and body"[5] Ego Geometria Sum is an attempt to trace one's body back "through a succession of geometric solids".

[11] The work comprises ten plywood sculptures that reflect the mass of the artist's body at a succession of ages from premature birth to maturity at 30.

[5] During their stay, she and her partner, David Notarius travelled to different locations, made mounds of snow and laid out a flower shaped metal cutter.

The woman's urine flow is strong and hot, resulting in a central penile form; the man's is diffuse and cooler, and creates the labial circumference.

[3] In a poem entitled Piss Posy (1991) Chadwick describes the works as "Vaginal towers with male skirt/ Gender bending water sport?".

Chadwick utilised the ceremonial character of the elegant neo-classical rooms of the upper galleries to house an installation made up of a number of autonomous artworks.

The platform presents a twelve-part collage of layered blue toned A4 photocopies made directly of the artist's naked form, dead animals, plants and drapery suspended in an ovoid pool.

On the walls of this room were photographs of the artist weeping, a Venetian glass mirror and printouts of computer-rendered drawings of the Baroque columns from the baldacchino of St Peter's in Rome.

[1] Effluvia responded to the parkland setting of the Serpentine; the installation was created in the form of a garden, surrounding themes of tamed and untamed nature with such works as Piss Flowers (1991–92) and a fountain of molten chocolate entitled Cacao (1994).

The exhibition also included new works Glossolalia (1993) and I Thee Wed (1993) that consisted of lamb tongues cast in bronze, fox pelts, and vegetables encircled in rings of fur.

[4] When asked the reason for making this work Chadwick explained "my libido demanded it", describing it as "a pool or primal matter, sexually indeterminate, in a perpetual state of flux".

[4] On the walls that surrounded Cacao were Chadwick's Wreaths of Pleasure (1992–93), a series of circular luminous photographs framed in enamelled metal that are over a metre in circumference.

[5] Combining delicate suspensions of flowers and fruit in household liquids such as hair gel and milk, the work alludes to a fluidity of boundaries.

In the preface to the catalogue, Marina Warner states that after the shock of Chadwick's death it took some time for "interest to return and for understanding to develop of her critical opus and her place in contemporary art".

[18] Eight of Chadwick's notebooks, which reveal her ideas and critical practice through the making of a number of her works, are available online from The Leeds Museums & Galleries and the Henry Moore Institute Archive.