She liked to dance and talk about sex and eat enough meat for two (at school she had been called “Spaghetti” for her lean-bodied voracity). People spotted her bobbed hair through crowds: “Sometimes I had a sense that going out with her was like going out with a rock star,” says Paley.Chadwick’s image had long been one of her projects, in her art and in her life – her clothes were always picked and pressed with infinite care; during the mid-Eighties, her work shifted away from feminist agit-prop and into more autobiographical, more sensual forms. Her early-Eighties sculpture series Ego Geometria Sum used mathematically precise plywood models of items from her past – a bed, a piano, a tent – with ghostly images of the adult Chadwick photographed onto their flat surfaces. The effect took weeks of mixing chemicals in the dark and gentle warming with hairdryers to achieve.When she emerged from her studio, however, Chadwick left her DIY side behind.

She flitted, sometimes flirted, her way through parties and openings, listening with her head to one side like a small bird, laughing a throaty laugh that dwarfed her careful speaking voice. Chadwick showed her how to convert her terrace into its current cool space: “Helen was always talking about craftsmanship – a constant fount of information about where you should go to get a particular button… She truly loved materials.”This love of making and making-do – oddly common among contemporary artists so often accused of airy conceptualising – drove Chadwick’s career She got tips from her then boyfriend Philip, an architect. She wears red lipstick and runs a grey-painted Tardis of a gallery, where Chadwick sometimes showed her work and arrived to get her fax on the last morning of her life (Paley was on the phone and couldn’t hang up). Chadwick enrolled for an MA at the nearby Chelsea School of Art just in time for the fun.In February 1977 she found herself somewhere bohemian to live as well. Beck Road was a double strip of Victorian terraces, fine-featured but semi-derelict, increasingly marooned in the south-Hackney traffic and earmarked for demolition by the Inner London Education Authority to make way for a college car-park.

Chadwick and two dozen other artists, including the sculptor Debbie Duffin and the (then) musical enfant terrible Genesis P-Orridge, saw the creative possibilities in the houses and their area’s long east-London vistas and moved in. After two anxious years the squatters persuaded ILEA, partly through a typically immaculate Chadwick dossier on the road’s history, to rent the houses rather than reduce them to rubble.Beck Road then became a hive of home studios. Residents lent each other materials and learnt where the local carpenters lived who could help with the difficult bits. Chadwick established a presence as she had in Brighton, giving advice, going to local gallery openings and employing neighbours. She stood at the bus stop in her leathers – taxis wouldn’t come out here – and made Beck Road her new family.

(Her mother had moved back to Athens, her brother to Sussex to run a sheep farm.)One of Chadwick’s first Hackney friends was a young Ivy League graduate from New York called Maureen Paley, who was studying at the Royal College of Art. When they met in 1978, “Helen was already a star,” says Paley “She had her Louise Brooks hairstyle and red lips. I said, ‘Who’s that girl?’ ” That year Chadwick persuaded Paley to strap herself inside a canvas mock-up of a cooker, along with other friends, for her first London show, another feminist-performance piece called In the Kitchen No one complained.Paley has stayed in Beck Road ever since. Hartney was so impressed he helped film it.Chadwick, however, was outgrowing Brighton. At weekends she went up to London to buy other strange clothes on the King’s Road from a shop called Let It Rock, which soon became Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm MacLaren’s Sex and a birthplace of sorts for punk.