NARRATOR: 

The starting-point for this piece by British sculptor Henry Moore was a curious object that he spotted in a friend’s garden.  

SARAH ROBERTS:  

Henry Moore was good friends with Sir Julian Huxley, who was an evolutionary biologist …  

NARRATOR:  

Sarah Roberts – 

ROBERTS: …who had this skull of an elephant in his garden as just a curiosity. And Henry Moore was completely taken with it and fascinated by the contrast between interior and exterior and the way that the bone kind of wrapped and-and turned itself from inside to outside.  

Those two points – they’re very sharp and don’t quite connect really set up a high tension both within the void, the open space in the middle, but also in that kind of ring-shaped, soft form around them. There’s this electricity almost that shoots out between those two points, like a spark plug. 

There’s a whole series of prints and drawings that he did specifically related to this skull; and the Huxleys later gave him the skull, and it was in his studio, I think, for the rest of his life because it was just something that he returned to again and again as a source.