'Sculpture – An Act of Praise'

At various points throughout her career, Hepworth referred to herself a Christian Scientist, an Anglican Catholic and even an ‘atheist’. These different schools of religious and spiritual thought had a profound effect on both her life and her sculptural output.

Hepworth was baptised and confirmed at Wakefield Cathedral, a building which she remembered as playing ‘a large part in my early life’. However, during her childhood her parents became committed to Christian Science, a relatively new religious movement that had spread from America based on an alternative reading of the Bible.

The central text associated with Christian Science was Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, published in 1875 by the founder of the movement, Mary Baker Eddy. Science and Health argued that there were two conceptions of reality: ‘mortal mind’, informed by the physical senses and based on a materialistic conception of reality, and ‘divine Mind’, which represented the true nature of existence. Hepworth owned several copies of Science and Health, some which date back as early as her teenage years.

Hepworth’s reignited interest in Christian Science also coincided with her increasing move towards abstraction. While she retrospectively connected her transition to pure abstraction with the birth of the triplets, this might also be read in relation to her practice of Christian Science. The ability of ‘divine Mind’ to transcend the material world offers a parallel with the move away from representation.

Many of the abstract artists in Hampstead in the 1930s also shared interests in transcendental religious modes. Piet Mondrian explored Theosophy, while Naum Gabo’s vision of Constructive art shared many parallels with Christian Science. 

In the early 1930s Hepworth began ‘piercing’ her sculptures, allowing her to physically remove material and sculpt with space as well as matter. In her writing from the period she describes how the ‘idea’ behind a work of art gives ‘life and vitality’ to what would otherwise just be material matter. Sculpture comes to possess ‘a spiritual inner life’. 

However, after her separation with Nicholson in 1951 and the death of her son Paul in 1953, Hepworth also returned to the Anglican faith.  St Ives Parish Church was close to her studio and she formed friendships with several members of the clergy.

After their move to Cornwall in 1939, Hepworth and Nicholson continued to follow the tenets of Christian Science, even consulting a Christian Science practitioner when their daughter Sarah was hospitalised in 1944. 

In 1965 Hepworth wrote that ‘sculpture should be an act of praise, an enduring expression of the divine spirit.’  The titles Ascending Form (Gloria) and Cantate Domino express this idea of praise, which is reflected in their triangular rising forms. 

In 1970, Hepworth further expanded on this idea of sculpture as ‘an act of praise’, stating that: 

‘My sculpture has often seemed to me like offering a prayer at moments of great unhappiness. When there has been a threat to life – like the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or now the menace of pollution – my reaction has been to swallow despair, to make something that rises up, something that will win. In another age [...] I would simply have carved cathedrals’

~Barbara Hepworth, 1970