Focus on Spring

During its run at The Hepworth Wakefield, the retrospective exhibition Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life (21 May 2021 – 27 February 2022) not only offered an exceptional opportunity to consider her entire career and work across multiple media, it also included sculptures produced in more than one material, at different times, and also facilitated the comparison of prototypes with completed sculptures.

Uniquely, the exhibition included versions of the sculpture Spring (1966) not just in plaster and bronze, but also more than one cast, allowing close inspection not only of the difference of its execution in alternative materials but the effects of display conditions and successive campaigns of conservation on two bronze casts made at the same moment.

Members of the Hepworth Research Network convened to examine in close detail three versions of Spring side-by-side, beginning with a discussion between the conservator Laura Davies and curator Eleanor Clayton.

Helena Bonett

Helena Bonett is a curator, writer and lecturer who completed her AHRC-funded collaborative doctorate at the Royal College of Art and Tate on the legacy of Barbara Hepworth. Helena was an Associate of the Tate St Ives’ Artists Programme in 2014-15, for which she directed a film about the Barbara Hepworth Museum, and in 2013 convened a Tate Research seminar focusing on the preserved studios at the Hepworth Museum as part of the Hepworth Studios Conservation Project. She is currently working on a research project at Dorich House Museum, Kingston University and tutors MA students in Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art, London.

Eleanor Clayton

Eleanor Clayton is Curator at The Hepworth Wakefield and a Barbara Hepworth specialist. As Assistant Curator at Tate Liverpool (2010–14) she curated displays around Hepworth’s work, alongside exhibitions of international modern art such as Mondrian and his Studios: Colour in Space and Nasreen Mohamedi. At The Hepworth Wakefield she has curated exhibitions such as Hepworth in Yorkshire and A Greater Freedom: Hepworth 1965-75, while bringing Hepworth’s work in dialogue with contemporary artists. Clayton has published widely on British Modern art. In addition to journal papers and reviews, she is editor and co-author of Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain and Alan Davie & David Hockney: Early Works. Her book Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life was published by Thames & Hudson in May 2021.

Laura Davies

Laura Davies is a freelance sculpture conservator for clients including The Hepworth Wakefield, Tate Liverpool, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Arts Council Collection, Leeds Art Gallery and the Henry Moore Institute. Recent projects have included the restoration of Hepworth’s Dual Form (1965) for Guildhall St Ives and two casts of The Family of Man (1970) at Wakefield and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Laura was Senior Sculpture Conservator at Tate Britain for ten years.

Stephen Feeke

Stephen Feeke is an independent writer and curator and is currently researching Hepworth’s early bronzes for a PhD at the Courtauld. Stephen’s text ‘Hepworth and the tache’ is available on the Hepworth Research Network website and he is contributing to the catalogue accompanying the first Hepworth exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (summer 2022). Stephen was previously a Director at the New Art Centre, Roche Court, where he worked alongside the Hepworth Estate, and prior to this was a curator at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.

Inga Fraser

Inga Fraser is a curator and writer specialising in twentieth century and contemporary with over ten years’ experience in museums and galleries, including curatorial posts at Tate and the National Portrait Gallery. Her research focuses on the impact of the emerging disciplines of film and photography on art in the twentieth century, and the convergences between art, fashion and design in the modern period. Her present doctoral project ‘Towards Artists’ Moving Image: Film and Cinematic Consciousness, Britain 1896-1966′, focuses on instances when cinematic form, theory, technology, architecture, discourse, ephemera and ideology influenced existing media of painting, sculpture and printmaking, and/ or inspired artists to work with film or forms of paracinema.

Hannah Leighton-Boyce

Hannah Leighton-Boyce is a Manchester-based visual artist. She works in a variety of sculpture formats, creating work for the public realm and gallery ranging from intimate actions and discrete objects to site-specific installation and durational performance. Hannah works across a variety of media, disciplines and processes, incorporating the environmental and architectural elements, and the social and material histories of a particular place, into her practice. In August 2021, Hannah participated in the Interdisciplinary residency in Hospitalfield, Arbroath (Scotland) where she spent time reflecting on a long term health condition and practices of care in relation to her research and making methodologies; looking at her body as both medium and site of her relational experience with place and process. Hannah is currently artist in residence at Darwen Terracotta & Faience in Blackburn; an ‘Art in Manufacturing’ organised through the National Festival of Making.

Simon Marginson

Simon Marginson is an independent art historian and curatorial researcher. His current project, ‘Herbert Read: The Accidental Collector’, traces the evolution of Read’s collection. Read owned at least nine works by Barbara Hepworth, and the project considers how he mobilised them in his self-presentation and writings.

Anneké Pettican

Dr Anneké Pettican is an artist and Subject Group Leader in Art and Communication at the University of Huddersfield. She is co-director of Brass Art with Chara Lewis and Kristin Mojsiewicz. Their collaborative practice examines aspects of the uncanny and their critically acclaimed work explores the double, the shadow and the limen. In order to develop and realise their ambitious work, Brass Art regularly collaborate with other artists, digital media specialists, electro-acoustic composers, designers and scientists. Recent exhibitions include: Sensorium, SUSAS Shanghai (2019); that-which-is-not, Bury Sculpture Centre, Manchester (2018); GESTURED, Chetham’s Library, Manchester (2017); and Brass Art: Freud’s House, The International3, Salford (2015).

Derek Pullen

Derek Pullen was Head of Sculpture Conservation at Tate, responsible for the care and conservation of all Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures in the national collection including those on loan from the Hepworth Estate in St Ives. He is now Co-Director of SculpCons Ltd, a sculpture conservation consultancy specialising in modern and contemporary works.

Rachel Rose Smith

Rachel Rose Smith studied at the University of Cambridge, the Courtauld and the University of York. Her PhD thesis focused on abstract art made in London and St Ives during the 1930s and ’40s. She was curator at the Heong Gallery at Downing College, Cambridge (2015–16), then Assistant Curator at Tate Britain (2016–2019). Exhibitions include The Bauhaus and Britain (Tate Britain Spotlight, 2019), Barbara Hepworth: Divided Circle(Heong Gallery, 2019) and St Ives: Movements in Art and Life (Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, 2020). She is currently working on the catalogue raisonné of Ben Nicholson’s paintings and reliefs.

Robert Sutton

Robert Sutton is a teaching fellow in twentieth-century art at the University of Leicester, and a specialist on the work of Henry Moore and the public art of post-war Britain. His current research is concerned with the memorial functions of some of the public artworks commissioned in the years following the Second World War, with a particular focus on the works of Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Peter Laszlo Peri.

James Thompson

James Thompson is a Leeds based artist and studio holder at Patrick Studios, East Street Arts. Thompson’s work deals with the perception of space and its interpretation, working across sculpture, moving image and site-responsive performance. Thompson graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2012. Recent exhibitions include: Spatial Drifts at Leeds Art Gallery, 2021; Parallel Architectures IIIII at Leeds Town Hall, INDEX Festival during Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019. In 2020, Thompson was selected as one of the YSI Sculpture Network Artists. Thompson works part-time as a lecturer in Design at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Michael White

Michael White is a Professor in History of Art working chiefly on the interwar avant-gardes. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Theo van Doesburg and has a special interest in De Stijl and modernism in the Netherlands. He was consultant curator of the 2010 Tate Modern exhibition Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World, advised the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag on the display of its permanent Mondrian and De Stijl collections, and was the external curator of the exhibition Mondrian and his Studios at Tate Liverpool in 2014. Michael is also the author of Generation Dada: The Berlin Avant-Garde and the First World War (Yale University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Virgin Microbe: Essays on Dada (Northwestern University Press, 2013).