Artist: Barbara Hepworth
Date: 1903-1975
Barbara Hepworth was born in 1903 and was one of few women to gain global recognition as an artist in the first half of the twentieth century. Her most celebrated sculptures were crafted in wood, stone and bronze and the exposition at The Tate Gallery looks back at these most recognisable and noteworthy pieces. Hepworth is now inarguably a modernist icon. An advocate for the dynamic nature of art, Hepworth insisted that her sculptures should be patted, walked around and peered inside.
Mother and Child 1934
Mother and Child is a small abstract stone sculpture, which is horizontal in configuration and has an undulating and biomorphic shape. The work’s title suggests that the sculpture is loosely figurative, with the larger shape that comprises most of the sculpture representing the reclining figure of the mother, and the smaller shape that rests on top of it a child held in her embrace. Although they are independent sculptural elements, both mother and child appear to have been carved from the same piece of Cumberland alabaster. Each of the figures has a nodule-shaped head with a single white eye drilled into it, and there is a large opening in the centre of the work that denotes the space beneath the mother’s arm as it rests upon her leg. The work sits off-centre on a thin rectangular base made from white-grey marble.
Sea Form (Porthmeor) 1958
Porthmeor is a beach close to Hepworth’s studio in St Ives, Cornwall. A critic thought this sculpture ‘seems to belong to the living world of the sea.’ The curling top lip of the bronze is like a representation of a breaking wave while the green and white patina of the inner surface recalls the colour of the sea and surf. At Porthmeor, Hepworth observed the changing tide, the movement of sand and wind, and the footprints of people and birds. For her, the rhythm of the tides was part of a natural order to which humankind also belongs.