Guest Post: Barbara Hepworth and Single Form (Antiphon)

Guest writer Susan Cohn writes an article on Barbara Hepworth, the focus of her Master's dissertation, and the artist's sculpture on exhibition in the local Yorkshire area...

Exhibition: Disobedient Bodies, The Hepworth Wakefield  Until June 18th, 2017

Dame Barbara Hepworth

Single Form (Antiphon), 1969

Bronze, 223.5 x 61 x 61 cm 

Barbara Hepworth initially carved this elegant, elongated vertical form Single Form, Antiphon in a natural boxwood in 1953 then had it cast in bronze in 1969 to reproduce the edition now at The Hepworth Wakefield in the dynamic exhibition Disobedient Bodies. The work has recently been restored and is on loan from the University of York’s art collection where it was originally placed within the natural landscape on the campus grounds outside the Jack Lyons Concert Hall. In the current exhibition Disobedient Bodies, Hepworth’s Single Form, Antiphon has moved from a dialogue with the outdoor landscape to multiple dialogues with brilliant fashion designs of the most current trends in the fashion industry and alongside sculptures of many of Hepworth’s former contemporaries such as Alberto Giacometti, Jean Arp, Henry Moore and Naum Gabo. Barbara Hepworth poetically articulates her inspiration for this sculpted form in her writing,

The forms which have had special meaning for me since 
childhood have been the standing form …. the inspiration 
always comes either from the artist in the landscape, 
feeling it, becoming it, or the spectator observing the 
figure in the landscape.  

Hepworth’s approach to sculpture was a technique of direct carving and her derivative of the ancient craft, one she learned early in her career from a master carver in Italy. She experimented with this method and adapted the process to capture her expression of a natural landscape in a sculptural form. Hepworth indicated in her writings that many of her works were locally inspired by the landscapes of Cornwall she experienced throughout her adult years in combination with forms of landscapes she fondly recalls from her childhood experiences in the Yorkshire West Riding area and the city of Wakefield. Her sensitive articulation in words of her sculptural expression by hand offers many poetic insights to a clearer understanding of her artistic sensibilities. In terms of her connection with nature and expression in material forms, she states:

All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. 
Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my 
father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the 
form. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically 
over the contours of fulnesses and concavities, through hollows 
and over peaks – feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and 
hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, 
am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust 
and the contour. 

If you walk along the path today from Whitby to Robin Hood’s Bay where Hepworth summered as a child with her family, you will see the rolling hills as they rise and fall alongside the cliffs embracing the waves along the shoreline of the coast. You can almost follow her feel the curves and lines of the forms as she carved them patiently and carefully out of the natural wood. The spiralling lines moving upward along the figure of Single Form, Antiphon seem to grow up from the base or the land if it were one of the ancient stones Hepworth observed and studied that still stand tall in mysterious formations in the Cornwall area. The subtle piercing holes of her sculpture are carved to allow a binocular view of the surrounding landscape, now the gallery conversations, previously in view of the outdoor ponds, greenery and flowers, birds and animals, of the campus landscape.

The original wood sculpture, it is on view at the Oxford University Ashmolean Gallery

Dame Barbara Hepworth

Single Form (Antiphon), 1953

Boxwood, 223.5 x 61 x 61 cm

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

In its natural setting, it was located near the Jack Lyons Concert Hall at the University of York  

This was the view of Single Form, Antiphon in dynamic dialogue with fashion designs in Disobedient Bodies

While visiting The Hepworth Wakefield, for those interested in further information on the making of bronze sculpture from original and plaster sculptures, there is the brilliant permanent collection in the next gallery of the plasters Hepworth donated to the museum. This includes informative videos, tools, illustrations, and gallery labels with explanations of the process of casting bronze from plasters and original materials. Many of Hepworth’s feature marble, wood, paintings, textiles and bronze works from the collection along with her personal library also now on display in The Barbara Hepworth Exhibition.  

Susan Cohn is currently a Masters student at the University of York, from Winnipeg, Canada.