The artist as part of the landscape

In a BBC documentary filmed in 1961, Barbara Hepworth is shown climbing through enormous rock formations high above the Cornish landscape before sitting to sketch on the outcrop, looking out on the landscape below. Her voice offers the following narration while the camera continues to survey the surrounding landscape, lingering over hills and sea: “All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. I remember moving through the landscape with my father in his car, and the hills were sculptures, the roads defined the forms. There was the sensation of moving physically over the fullness of a moor, and through the hollows and slopes of peaks and dales, feeling, seeing, touching, through the mind, the eye and the hand. The touch and texture of things. Sculpture, rock, myself and the landscape. This sensation has never left me, I the sculptor, am the landscape.”² 


The artist originally recorded this reminiscence for the radio broadcast “The Sculptor Speaks”. It has become a central framework for understanding Hepworth’s work and was repeated in the early pages of her 1970 Pictorial Autobiography, which has set the tone for much subsequent interpretation of her work. The emphasis on material encounter, form, shape and texture offers many ways to understand Hepworth’s work, from specific associations with a particular British landscape to more general reflections on humanity’s relationship to the world around us.


The early memories Hepworth describes are from her childhood in the West Riding of Yorkshire where her father Herbert Hepworth was the county surveyor. As the eldest of four children, she was sometimes permitted to accompany him on his travels on official business across the county while he examined the civic structures, roads and bridges. These trips instilled within Hepworth what she described in 1937 as “form consciousness … the consciousness and understanding of volume and mass, laws of gravity, contour of the earth under our feet, thrusts and stresses of internal structure, space displacement and space volume, the relation of man to a mountain and man’s eye to the horizon.”³ 


Despite this, her early works did not represent the landscape as such, being broadly figurative, such as Mother and Child (1934, though there was a connection to nature through her chosen materials. 


Crucial to Hepworth’s artistic practice is the technique of direct carving. This involves the artist carving the sculptural form from the material of wood or stone directly, rather than modelling in clay and handing the execution over to a master craftsman, as was common practice at the time. For Hepworth, engaging with natural materials became paramount. In 1930 she stated, in an article that formed part of the series “Contemporary English Sculptors” printed in The Architectural Association Journal: “… there is an unlimited variety of materials from which to draw inspiration. Each material demands a particular treatment and there are an infinite number of subjects in life each to be re-created in a particular material. In fact, it would be possible to carve the same subject in a different stone each time, throughout life, without a repetition of form”.⁴


Hepworth had returned to London in 1926 following an artistic residency in Italy, and by the time of writing this statement had already begun to establish herself as a leading proponent of direct carving. Her return to England had offered an array of new experiences of landscape. Although based in London, her visits to the coast made profound impressions. In 1931 she met another artist, Ben Nicholson, and sent him photographs of rocks she had taken during a recent trip to the Isles of Scilly, just off England’s most southern tip, writing in the accompanying letter: “They have moved me more than anything I have ever seen sculpturally. We took a boat out into the western islands and there were purple rocks, groups of rocks, hundreds of rocks all worn by the water and yet retaining their fundamental thrust and we sailed round watching the changing aspects and the revealing of surprising movement.”⁵


Shortly after this correspondence, Nicholson joined Hepworth and a group of artists on holiday in Happisburgh in Norfolk. In her letter, Hepworth had described the landscape on the east coast similarly enraptured: “the country is quite flat but for a little hill with a tall flint church and a lighthouse. The trees are all bowed to west and birds seem to dominate all. I feel as though I too have wings on such flat earth. The beach is a ribbon of pale sand as far as the eye can see.”⁶ During this trip Hepworth and Nicholson began a romantic relationship, which spelled the end of her marriage with Skeaping. Hepworth and Nicholson became part of a network of contemporary artists pioneering geometric abstraction between London and Paris, as Nicholson split his time between Hepworth in London and his first wife Winifred Nicholson and their children in Paris from 1932 onwards. Hepworth in turn made trips to France, where she visited the studios of Hans Arp, Constantin Brâncuși, and Piet Mondrian among others. Of the visit to Arp’s studio she wrote: “seeing his work for the first time freed me of many inhibitions and this helped me to see the figure in the landscape with new eyes. I stood in the corridor almost all the way [on the train to Avignon] looking out on the superb Rhone valley and thinking of the way Arp had fused landscape with the human form in so extraordinary a manner.”⁷ 


She and Nicholson became part of the Paris-based group Abstraction-Création, alongside artists such as Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder and Naum Gabo. Gabo moved to London in March 1936 and became close collaborators with Hepworth and Nicholson. In 1937 they collectively published the volume Circle: An International Survey of Constructive Art to articulate their shared aesthetic principles. Nicholson, Gabo and architect Leslie Martin acted as the editors, while the layout and production were managed by Hepworth and designer Sadie Speight, who was married to Martin. The book was divided into four sections, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and a final section on “Art and Life”, which addressed diverse topics and included among other things essays by Walter Gropius on “Art Education and State”, by Léonide Massine on “Choreography”, and “A Note on Biotechnics” by Karel Honzík. The latter suggested that the geometric abstraction that formed the basis of Circle had its roots in the observation and understanding of the natural world. Honzík outlined “… two branches of technology in constant process of evolution, one human and the other phytogenical”, noting instances where modern design mirrors the functional forms of nature when viewed microscopically.⁸ This was echoed in an essay in the Sculpture section “Art and the Scientist”, by crystallographer John Desmond Bernal. Bernal illustrated his point about the closeness of art and physics by juxtaposing two formally similar images; a photograph of Hepworth’s sculpture Two Forms (1934) with an illustration of an “Equi-potential surface of two like charges”. Hepworth devoted her own essay in Circle to form consciousness in relation to landscape. She also believed that abstraction was related to the natural world through its articulation of the laws of physics, and referred to “the principles and laws which are the vitalization of our experience, and sculpture a vehicle for projecting our sensibility to the whole of existence.”⁹


The outbreak of World War II in the autumn of 1939 and the threat of impending bombing prompted Hepworth and Nicholson to leave London. They took up the invitation from friends Margaret Mellis and Adrian Stokes to bring their family to Carbis Bay, in the far south-west of England. Here, in rural Cornwall, the influence of landscape became perhaps most overtly present in Hepworth’s work. In the early 1940s she created largely abstract sculptures in wood, stone or plaster, with painted interiors of white, yellow, and shades of blue and often incorporating a complex interlacing of strings that emphasize the negative space in and around the forms. In 1952 Hepworth wrote of these works: “the colour in the concavities plunged me into the depth of water, caves, of shadows deeper than the carved concavities themselves. The strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills.”¹⁰ 


Hepworth wrote lyrically of the material make-up of the earth and the aesthetics of geology: “The incoming and receding tides made strange and wonderful calligraphy of the pale granite sand which sparkled with felspar and mica. The rich mineral deposits of Cornwall were apparent on the very surface of things; quartz, amethyst, and topaz; tin and copper below in the old mine shafts, and geology and prehistory – a thousand facts induced a thousand fantasies of form and purpose, structure and life which had gone into the making of what I saw and what I was.”¹¹


This reveals the close bodily proximity and connection Hepworth felt to her new surroundings. In the same text she reflected on her experience of the Cornish landscape over the previous decade in terms that reveal not just an observation of nature, but a participation within, and an ontological state of being a fully integrated part of a whole: “I was the figure in the landscape and every sculpture contained to a greater or lesser degree the ever-changing forms and contours embodying my own response to a given position in the landscape. What a different shape and ‘being’ one becomes lying on the sand with the sea almost above from when standing against the wind on a high sheer cliff with seabirds circling patterns below one, and again what a contrast between the form one feels within oneself sheltering near some great rocks or reclining in the sun on the grass-covered rocky shapes which make the double spiral of Pendour or Zennor Cove; this transmutation of essential unity with land and seascape, which derives from all the sensibilities, was for me a voyage of exploration.”¹²


Hepworth’s titles also began increasingly to acknowledge the influence of the landscape, such as Sea Form (Porthmeor) from 1958, the parenthesized title referring to the scenically spectacular bay to the south of St Ives, today a popular site for both surfing, but also a location in which climate emergency protests are held. Hepworth had returned to working in metal in 1956, and bronze-cast works like Sea Form (Porthmeor) elucidate the constant dynamism of nature, further heightened by Hepworth’s distinctive approach to the material. A notebook written in 1961 lists various materials and their properties: “fire, running metal, molten – passionate, arrested movement – inducement of sound and resonance”, distinguished from “sheet under tension”, which is linked to “related rhythms of curves”.¹³ Though both forms of metal sculpture relate to movement, those of sheet metal held in tension have titles that convey controlled rhythm, such as Curved Form (Pavan), – pavan being a 16^th century court dance. The bronze works were created by making a metal armature covered in wire, then plaster, which was then coated with liquid metal. Due to its plasticity, plaster is well suited for creating fluid, open forms. The sculptures are evocative of the uncontrollable forces of nature, from the quieter Corymb (1959 – a botanical term describing the shape of an umbrella-like inflorescence – to those like Sea Form (Porthmeor) and Involute II which invoke the rolling movement of the sea. Hepworth wrote: “These are all sea forms and rock forms, related to Porthcurno on the Land’s End coast with its queer caves pierced by the sea. They were experiences of people – the movement of people in and out is always a part of them. They are bronze sculptures, and the material allows more openness of course.”¹⁴


The move to metal was surprising for an artist who had become known for her use of carved, organic materials. Working with metal gave Hepworth the opportunity to push the negative space in her sculptures further, and to realise works of greater size. However, it should not be misunderstood as a concession to the working methods of the younger generation of sculptors of the “Geometry of Fear” who worked predominantly in metal and expressed post-war, Cold War, anxieties in their work. In 1951 a conversation between Hepworth and fellow British sculptor – and “Geometry of Fear” artist – Reg Butler, the latter somewhat dismissed Hepworth’s carvings as reflections of a “pastoral existence” belonging to “an age of stability” which he felt had passed. His metal works and those of his generation on the other hand addressed the fears of the postwar period as well as of the Cold War. Their metal works reflected living “in a tumult of grinders and welders and roaring fires and a kind of manifestation of anxiety through life.”¹⁵Hepworth objected on several points, firstly pointing out that she did not believe anything akin to an idyllic culture had ever existed, and that humans had always been confronted with problems.¹⁶ She also pointed to the anxieties of the present moment, which equally infused her sculptures, noting, “I am convinced that in this 20^th century we shall all become extinct unless we re-stress the living values of what are primitive instincts in man and are the only things which really keep him alive.”¹⁷ 


She believed humans needed to try to live in harmony with nature again. And she held fast to these values as she expanded her choice of materials to include liquid metal, which she employed to give shape to the “perpetual movement” of nature. In fact, Hepworth had long been attuned to technological advances and considered these in an aesthetic dialogue with the natural world, which she had already described in 1934 in a statement for artist collective Unit One via a journey through landscape, ‘In an electric train moving south I see a blue aeroplane between a ploughed field and a green field, pylons in lovely juxtaposition with springy turf and trees of every stature.’¹⁸ This entanglement of technology and landscape reverberated in Hepworth’s responses to the ‘space race’ of the 1960s. She noted in an exchange of letters and conversations with Edward Mullins beginning in 1969/70 that the fact that humans could fly to the moon not only radically changed the way people thought but had also had a decisive influence on sculpture and its forms. ^¹⁹ And in a note written in 1966 titled “The Sun and Moon” she stated that this new, scientific age demanded a new sense of poetry.²⁰ The cavities in her sculptures thus took on new meaning by connecting to both earth and the cosmic landscape. ^²¹
Although Hepworth embraced technological advances, she was also aware of the increasingly problematic relationship between humanity and environment. In 1970 she stated in an interview: “Pollution, pest control, conservation – all these things are of absolutely vital importance. I would think we have no more than about twenty years to cope with these and their related problems. … We are repeatedly told it is urgent, the operative word is ‘immediate.’”²²


Hepworth used her position as one of Britain’s most notable artists to influence political decisions as they related to the environment. In 1963, for example, she supported local activists opposing the reopening of a tin mine in Cornwall : “We have a duty to posterity to ensure we do not despoil places of rare beauty and quiet solitude. To do so for any reason whatsoever would be a confession of total failure on the part of our generation, and a crime, on our part, if we do not preserve for our children what we ourselves have been bequeathed. That is, a place to visit where we can feel at one with God and the universe.”²³ 


The connection between spirituality and landscape was repeatedly articulated by Hepworth nearing the end of her life, though it can be found in her letters much earlier. In 1943 Hepworth wrote to her friend and critic E. H. Ramsden: “Here, where people respect a stone in a field – one gets the direct impact of man’s spiritual reaction to sculpture.”²⁴ She was here referring to the Neolithic monuments of prehistoric Britons that pepper the Cornish landscape, and one of these in particular relates to one of her most significant public sculptures. Single Form (Chûn Quoit) (p. 100) was made in 1961, shortly after the death of Dag Hammarskjöld. The Secretary General of the United Nations had contacted Hepworth in 1956 after selecting one of her sculptures for his office, starting a correspondence that became a friendship. They met in London in 1958 when Hammarskjöld gave an address on the UN’s diplomatic role in achieving global nuclear disarmament, a subject close to Hepworth’s heart as an active advocate for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain. 


Hammarskjöld had considered commissioning a sculpture by Hepworth for the pool in front of the UN Headquarters in New York, and Hepworth recalled: “We talked about the nature of the site, and about the kind of shapes he liked. I also made [Single Form] Chûn Quoit and the small walnut carving, Single Form (September), with Dag in mind”.²⁵ Chûn Quoit refers to a Neolithic stone arrangement in Cornwall, and Hepworth saw these forms as symbols of protection. She believed the upright form to be a symbol for the primal human desires for protection and security.²⁶ In September 1961 Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash, and the commission proceeded in his memory. Single Form (1961-64) is one of Hepworth’s most monumental public commissions, yet it remains deeply connected to the landscape. 


For Hepworth these seeming opposites – metropolitan and rural, international and local, monumental and intimate – were often in close dialogue and formed integral parts of the human experience, expressed through sculptural form. As she wrote in 1965: “A Sculptor’s landscape embraces all things that grow and live and are articulate in principle: the shape of the buds already formed in autumn, the thrust and fury of spring growth, the adjustment of trees and rocks and human beings to the fierceness of winter – all these belong to the sculptor’s world, as well as the supreme perception of man, woman and child of this expanding universe.”²⁷