Barbara Hepworth

Barbara Hepworth DBE (10 January 1903 – 20 May 1975) was an English modernist-abstract sculptor. She helped to develop modern art (sculpture in particular) in Britain along with contemporaries such as Gabo, Moore and Nicholson.

A new £35 million museum dedicated to Hepworth, the Hepworth Wakefield, opened in Britain in May 2011 at Wakefield in West Yorkshire.

The artist sometimes combined organic form with natural materials and the use of string. The Russian Constructivist sculptor, Naum Gabo used nylon thread in his sculpture from around 1938 and Hepworth, who knew him well, may have been influenced by this, as well as by mathematical models. The string emphasizes the tension between the interior and exterior of the work. This tension is further highlighted by the contrast between the polished wood and matt, painted interior (National Gallery, Scotland).

Pelagos, 1946

Pelagos ('sea' in Greek) was inspired by a view of the bay at St Ives in Cornwall, where two arms of land enfold the sea on either side. The hollowed-out wood has a spiral formation resembling a shell, a wave or the roll of a hill. Hepworth wanted the taut strings to express 'the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills'. She moved to Cornwall with her husband Ben Nicholson in 1939, and produced some of her finest sculpture in its wild landscape.

Personally I am greatly influenced by the ideas of Hepworth's and Gabo's. As I design my work and write down my ideas, I try to go through the same processes. Natural materials, tension, mathematical and architectural models and the different ways to view the sculpture are some things I consider when thinking of ideas.