Thursday, July 24, 2025

Thursday Thoughts...

"All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fullnessess and concavities, through hollows and over peaks - feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and the hollow, the thrust and the contour". 

Barbara Hepworth

Reading these words after seeing Hepworth's work, they make so much sense. Her work is full of hollows and concavities; gentle rises, curves and peaks.

The manner in which she describes her body's place in the landscape and how that translates to her sculptures (and clearly also her drawings) made me wonder about how it was to live in her body that way.

The amazing experience it must have been to feel all of the landscape and then have that feeling and movement move through her and be re-created in stone, with string, or on paper. You look at her work, and you can see and feel her landscape.

I love gazing at her work and it is really special that the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness on Orkney has a lot of it. Each time we visit we spend time with her work. It is both settling and soothing. 



Curved Stone (detail), 1946

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