Helen Chadwick, Unbound

In this paper I consider Helen Chadwick’s major digital montage series Viral Landscapes (1988-89) in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the UK. The Landscapes were initially commissioned as part of the ‘Artists in National Parks’ project, a government and oil industry-sponsored programme of artists producing new work in response to the protected landscapes of England and Wales. Chadwick used the opportunity to reflect upon the penetration of HIV across the UK, in the moment immediately following the government’s controversial ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ (1987) AIDS awareness campaign, which had mobilised tropes of landscape imagery to instil fear of the epidemic in the population.

First reframing Chadwick’s practice in the later 1980s as profoundly political, I then examine the Landscapes as a critique of the conservative cultural politics of nature, used at this moment both to cover over the economic and environmental degradations of renewed capitalism and to stigmatise people with HIV as ‘unnatural’. The essay concludes that Viral Landscapes have major contributions to make to ascendent debates in studies of HIV/AIDS that seek to examine the distribution of the epidemic across the varied and uneven spaces of globalisation, especially across rural environments.