A biolith is a sedimentary rock formed from fossilized animal remains. In 1939, Barbara Hepworth relocated from London to St. Ives in Cornwall, where, surrounded by magnificent cliffs, crescent beaches, and ancient rock formations, she became fascinated by geology. Biolithic rock often contains imprints of the organisms trapped between the layers of sediment and forms a repository of thousands of years of history. Here the ancient and the modern are collapsed into one form. The two faces that emerge from the marbled surface evoke fossilized organisms but retain the modernist simplicity the artist explored in the 1930s. Hepworth’s secretary at the time, David Lewis, wrote about this and similar pieces, saying that their “lithic forms” were “synonymous with the most ancient of man’s symbols, the monolith, lonely and foreboding” and absorbed the “cromlechs and the stone circles and granite obelisks of the Cornish landscape of Penwith.”
Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2020
Credit Line: Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Virginia Vogel Mattern in memory of her husband, W. Gray Mattern, Yale BA 1946
© Bowness