Sculpture with Colour and Strings

Barbara Hepworth

This work was conceived in 1939, when Hepworth had moved to Cornwall with her husband, the painter Ben Nicholson, and their children. During the war - when Hepworth had little opportunity to carve - she made a series of drawings of abstract stringed forms with colour. Later in her life Hepworth talked about the influence of the St Ives landscape and the sea on her work, explaining particularly the impact of these early sculptures with colour and string: “It was during this time that I gradually discovered the remarkable pagan landscape which lies between St Ives, Penzance and Land’s End: a landscape which still has a very deep effect on me, developing all my ideas about the relationship of the human figure in landscape - sculpture in landscape and the essential quality of light in relation to sculpture which induced a new way of piercing the forms to create colour [...] The sea, a flat diminishing plane, held within itself the capacity to radiate an infinitude of blues, greys, greens and even pinks of strange hues; the lighthouse and its strange rocky island was an eye, the island of St Ives an arm, a hand, a face [...] I used colour and strings in many of the carvings at this time. The colour in the concavities plunged me into the depth of water, caves or shadows deeper than the carved concavities themselves. The strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hill”.

1939-1961

Bronze with a light brown and light green patina and string

24.8 x 18.0 x 19.0 cm

205

© Bowness. Image courtesy of The Ingram Collection

This work is part of The Ingram Collection of Modern British & Contemporary Art and was on loan to the Lightbox for the exhibition "Redressing the balance: Women Artists from The Ingram Collection" (11 August - 20 September 2020).