Full transcript
0:00Barbara Hepworth was often credited as being one of the most influential artists
0:08working in the UK in the 20th century. She made constant reference to the
0:14natural landscapes that surrounded her in her adopted home of Cornwall.
0:24Hepworth moved to St Ives in 1939 with her family
0:32and stayed here for the rest of her life and the town of St Ives and the
0:38surrounding landscapes have influenced her works in numerous and interesting ways.
0:44As soon as they moved down here, Hepworth fell in love with this Cornish landscape.
0:49So this bit between St Ives, Penzance, Lands End. You've got these big granite boulders
0:55perched on top of hilltops and then you've also got these ancient monuments. Nobody
0:59really knows what they were used for and so that allows the artist to be able to come in
1:04and there's room for the imagination to work in terms of what are they? What were they used for?
1:09And so she just fell in love with that.
1:11In 1949, Hepworth bought Trewyn Studio, the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden
1:25as it is known now. Which was a really transformative moment in her practice.
1:30Until she moved to the town, she really didn't have a place to work very well and I think it gave
1:40her so much confidence. She was very much ahead of her time in the things that she wanted to do.
1:49When you enter this space, there is a house she used as her home.
1:55There's the most beautiful garden, which she personally nurtured.
1:59One thing that it did allow her was that she could carve outside, so the weather
2:05is is a big factor. The fact that she could witness the cycles of the sun and the moon,
2:10which occur in many of her prints in later years.
2:14For her Trewyn was an incredibly special place and and even today
2:19it's like an oasis in the middle of St Ives.
2:28In the 1950s, Hepworth began to explore the potential of working in metal and
2:35particularly bronze. Curve Form Trevalgan, the work is named after Trevalgan Hill which is a
2:41hill just behind the town of St Ives which overlooks the Celtic Sea. She was inspired
2:46by the experience of standing atop this hill and not only looking out to sea along a valley,
2:51but also feelings of the vast landscape that surrounded her.
2:57She's trying to communicate feelings of the human figure in the landscape.
3:04When you look at the Hepworth sculptures,
3:06it's not about, what does it look like? It's about, how does it make me feel?
3:19She acquired a second studio called the Palais De Danse, which is exactly opposite
3:25the entrance of the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden and this second studio
3:29gave her the possibility to work in a very large scale indoors, as well as outdoors,
3:35and it was there that she created some of her most important public commissions.
3:40One of the reasons that she bought the Palais De Danse was that she could
3:44construct these bigger sculptures. She needs to work horizontally on the floor,
3:49because of these big plaster panels. You can't make them any other way.
3:53Her dad was an engineer. If you look at some of those big sculptures that she's got,
3:57it's about welding. It's about using really practical engineering
4:01skills. She's got this very creative, intuitive, feeling side and then this
4:06really practical, logical, engineer's brain about construction and she's
4:13able to marry the two to create these big sculptures that are still standing today.
4:18It's said that she made more sculptures in the 1960s than in the rest of her life combined. She
4:29became very interested in technological advances around space travel. Partially inspired by her
4:34visit to the Goonhilly Earth station on the Lizard in Cornwall and there are works that
4:39actually might be seen to directly reference the satellite dishes that
4:44she saw at Goonhilly Earth station. Goonhilly, the first dish was constructed in 1962 and she
4:50was invited to go and stand in the first big dish and she said it was
4:56the most sort of magical and surreal experience of just standing there.
5:00This idea of space itself is also this place of the imagination,
5:05where you can let your imagination run riot.
5:08You've got this connection of both these amazing forms that Hepworth would constantly use in her
5:15work. You know, this sort of circular enclosed form and then this upright standing form and one's completely
5:23ancient and Neolithic and the other one is absolutely the cutting edge of technology.
5:35The gender landscape was really tough. It was a very male dominated world for the modern artists.
5:47I'm amazed how she kept going really in the face of a lot of negativity.
5:56I always say how privileged we all feel that she lived here. When you have an artist who
6:04is so closely linked with a place, that gives you a lasting idea about her role and her importance.