Barbara Hepworth
Artist’s Statement
"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 fulnesses 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 I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour."
Biography
Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth DBE (January 10, 1903 – May 20, 1975) was an influential English artist and sculptor whose work exemplifies Modernism, particularly in modern sculpture. Alongside figures like Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading member of the St Ives artists' colony during World War II.
Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, Hepworth studied at the Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art in the 1920s. She married sculptor John Skeaping in 1925 but, after falling in love with painter Ben Nicholson in 1931, she divorced Skeaping in 1933. During this period, she became part of a vibrant modernist circle in Hampstead, London, and helped found the Unit One art movement.
At the onset of World War II, Hepworth and Nicholson relocated to St Ives, Cornwall, where she would spend the rest of her life. Although celebrated for her sculpture, Hepworth also created drawings—most notably a series of operating room sketches inspired by her daughter's hospitalization in 1944—and lithographs. Tragically, she passed away in a fire at her studio in 1975.Website
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