Chadwick's work of the late 1970s explored her social situation in relation to the kitchen, for example, or the dole office. In the 1980s, she concentrated more on how the female self is constructed through social and cultural structures. In 1986, she mounted an important exhibition consisting of a double installation entitled Of Mutability, one of which used photocopies of her own body, animals and trinkets in order to convey an image of female pleasure and bodily sensation. The other installation, called Carcass, displayed a column of compost as "a way of thinking about your own body standing there. The fact that it's subject to death and decay".

In 1988, Chadwick began to work on a series of photographs where histological photos of cells from her own body were superimposed on a rocky coastal landscape. These strangely beautiful works also suggested the colonisation of the body by virus and the colonisation of the land by the body. In Meat Abstracts (1989), Chadwick arranged in a small space large still-life polaroid photographs of cuts of meat, offal, glands, tongues etc juxtaposed with fine leather, silk and velvets. This forced the viewer to confront feelings about recently dead meat in terms of one's own flesh and bodily parts.