SHAPE SHIFTER
Barbara Hepworth’s innovative sculptures and her lasting contribution to modern art are explored in a major new show
To be a positive and productive person, Barbara Hepworth believed one should sustain ‘proper coordination between hand and spirit on our daily life’. Throughout her 50-year career, the artist infused her sculptures and drawings with this philosophy, approaching the organic materials she used with a clear vision of what possibilities lay beneath their surface. ‘She was always pushing the boundaries of what sculpture could be,’ says Eleanor Clayton, who has curated a tribute to this 20th-century visionary to celebrate 10 years of the Hepworth Wakefield – a gallery that, since its opening, has become a cultural jewel in the crown of the artist’s hometown.
Growing up in West Yorkshire, Hepworth was surrounded by dramatic landscapes of time-worn cliffs and nature-hewn hills, which were catalysts for the moulded monoliths that came to characterise her work. Today, she is heralded as one of Britain’s foremost Modernist sculptors, a pioneer in a sphere that was overwhelmingly male-dominated. All her life, Hepworth resisted any attempts to be defined by her gender, arguing that ‘Art is anonymous. It’s not competitive with men’ – and with many of her most prominent pieces still standing today in public spaces, such as her bronze Single Form in New York’s United Nations Plaza and the limestone sculpture that presides over Hampstead Heath, her work has truly stood the test of time.
The exhibition will contain the largest number of Hepworth creations to be seen together since her death in 1975. It will trace the global events that shaped her life and practice, from the rise of fascism in the Thirties and World War II, when resources were so scarce that Hepworth sculpted with coloured string, to the Space Race of the Sixties, which prompted her to experiment with ‘cosmic’ materials such as crystal. On a more personal level, we learn how visiting the Parisian studios of Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi in 1933 dared a young Hepworth to be more radical with
abstraction; while giving birth to her triplets a year later compelled her to create the ovular Three Forms; and meeting the South African-British composer Priaulx Rainier in 1951 cultivated a sense of rhythm in her chiselling.
Just as she was influenced by others, Hepworth remains a heroine to many contemporary artists, including Tacita Dean and Veronica Ryan, who have each made new pieces that resonate with Hepworth’s for the show. Dean has crafted an installation from her postcards collected from fleamarkets across the world. ‘I chose the ones that could in some way relate to sculpture – anything from cacti to fountains and waterfalls, and corporeal forms, like busts,’ she says. ‘I was looking at what could constitute a sculpture in life.’ Ryan, who was the first artist ever to undertake a residency in Hepworth’s old studio in St Ives, describes the affinity she feels with Hepworth’s practice as ‘visceral’. ‘It becomes part of your subconscious,’ she explains. For one of her pieces, she has created plaster-casts of seed pods taken from the magnolia-tree in Hepworth’s garden; for another, she has crocheted Cornish fishing lines.
Ryan, like so many others, continues to be emboldened by the vitality in Hepworth’s work, the magic of which is perhaps best encapsulated by the artist herself, who said: ‘Sculpture communicates an immediate sense of life – you can feel the pulse of it.’
‘Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life’ is at the Hepworth Wakefield from 21 May to 27 February 2022 (www.hepworth wakefield.org).