Pierced Forms

Barbara Hepworth’s description of her late 1940s abstract drawings offers insight into how the British sculptor used drawing as an experimental medium throughout her career:

Abstract drawing has always been for me a particularly exciting adventure. First there is one’s mood; then the surface takes one’s mood in colour and texture; then a line or curve which, made in a pencil on the hard surface of many coats of oil or gouaches, has a particular kind of “bite” rather like on slate; then one is lost in a new world of a thousand possibilities because the next line in association with the first will have a compulsion about it which will carry one forward into completely unknown territory….Suddenly before one’s eyes is a new form which, from the sculptor’s point of view, free as it is from the problems of solid material, can be deepened or extended, twisted or flattened, tightened and hardened according to one’s will, as one imbues it with its own special life.