NARRATOR:  

Barbara Hepworth was raised in the windswept, rocky countryside of northern England.  

SFX: Single note 

SARAH ROBERTS:  

She was always thinking of sculpture in terms of forms in a landscape.  

NARRATOR:  

Curator Sarah Roberts.  

ROBERTS:  

She was very interested in-in things like seashells and natural organic forms and ideas in nature of interior and exterior — so the pearl inside the shell, you know the infant inside the mother or the kind of cradling, of forms that that implies.  

And there are fantastic images of her with this sculpture when she was carving the plaster form of it, with her-her body almost sort of draped around in this very physical, bodily relationship to the sculpture itself. And so there’s a very human body kind of scale and relationship and connection to the artist’s physical labor of creating this piece.  

She wanted someone looking at this sculpture to walk around it and for your body to have a physical relationship with the voids and the shapes. Look through it. See what you can see through the other side. Understand the visual connections that she was trying to make between the sculpture and its environment. 

SFX: Music fades