Contemporary Artists and Barbara Hepworth

Channer created a new body of work for 2013 exhibition Invertebrates at The Hepworth Wakefield. The work was inspired by invertebrate jellyfish, squid and other deep-sea boneless life forms.

In 2009 Alice Channer wrote about Hepworth: 

‘while moving around Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures and writing about them, I am aware of them framing me as I am framing them. What interests me in Hepworth’s work now is the way in which it can make
relationships like these between people and objects happen in the present.’

Between 1998 and 2000 Montserrat-born British artist Veronica
Ryan undertook an artist residency based at the Palais de Danse in St Ives and created new sculptures from some of Hepworth’s unused marble gifted by the Hepworth Estate.

During her time there, Ryan made a series of works that responded to Hepworth’s sculpture, the Cornish landscape and to her own interests in interior and exterior forms, identity and place. A number of these pieces have since joined existing works by the artist in the Tate collection and Arts Council Collection.

In 2017 Ryan undertook a residency at The Art House in Wakefield. As part of the residency, The Art House and The Hepworth Wakefield co-commissioned a new work inspired by Hepworth. 

Robertson’s practice spans sculpture, photography, drawing and performance to explore the boundaries of the human body and its environment. In 2019 Robertson was one of five Associate Artists selected as part of Yorkshire Sculpture International. Paired with The Hepworth Wakefield, their body of work created during this period titled Stone (Butch) was exhibited within the display of work by Barbara Hepworth. 

Robertson, like Barbara Hepworth, is interested in the physical relationship between the body and the landscape. Stone (Butch) explored gender and sexuality in the natural landscape of West Yorkshire, with a new film work and surface casts of the Bridestone rock formations.

Robertson relocated to West Cornwall at the beginning of 2020, shortly before UK lockdown, after being selected as a short-let tenant at Porthmeor Studios. They produced a new body of work during this specific moment in history, when tourists were absent from St Ives and its streets resembled the quiet town, similar to the environment Hepworth would have experienced in the 1940s.

In 2020 The Hepworth Wakefield acquired new works by Robertson  produced during their time as studio holder at Porthmeor Studios. The acquisition was made possible through the Contemporary Art Society's Rapid Response Fund.

Robertson’s new work, Packing, looks at the terrain of the Queer body in the seascape, its caves, openings and overspills. Robertson articulates their interest in exploring connections between their own body and the rhythms and forms of the landscape as transcending  ‘a marginalised Queer history based on colonial and western homophobic and transphobic ideas of being deemed “against nature”’.

The large charcoal, gouache and graphite drawing,The Island, references the so-called 'Island' at St Ives, a small peninsula between St Ives harbour and Porthmeor beach. The drawing depicts a bodily island, partly submerged and drawn automatically from the experience of swimming around coves, rocks and caves.

These new works are a continuation of ideas Robertson explored in Stone Butch and demonstrate an ongoing interest in Barbara Hepworth’s deep connection to the landscape.