Spring

Barbara Hepworth moved to Cornwall with her husband, the painter Ben Nicholson, and their triplets at the outbreak of war in 1939. The landscape she saw around her in West Penwith provided her with a lifelong inspiration for her sculpture. Like Naum Gabo, she used taut string in some of her sculptures, and she wrote of her work: ‘The colour in the concavities plunged me into the depth of water, caves or shadows deeper than the carved concavities themselves. The strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills.’