Six Forms (2 x 3)

Six Forms (2 x 3)
1968
Plaster on a wooden base
59 × 89 × 45 cm (with base)
Presented by the artist’s daughters, Rachel Kidd and Sarah Bowness, through the Trustees of the Barbara Hepworth Estate and the Art Fund. Photography Mark Heathcote © Bowness, Hepworth Estate

The elements in Six Forms (2 x 3) seem to have been recycled from an earlier work. Hepworth did this on occasion, for example the plaster of Squares with Two Circles (1964) is known to have been broken up and used again. It has been proposed that the work was made up from fragments of a Single Form. The six cast forms would have been reworked by Hepworth to texture the surface and carve the holes. A coloured version of this work was exhibited at the Penwith Society of Arts Winter exhibition held at the Penwith Gallery in St Ives between December 1968 and January 1969.

Hepworth related Six Forms (2 x 3) to a specific experience of the landscape, as the writer Edwin Mullins recorded in 1970: ‘She describes how the angles at which the pieces are set, and the patterning on the bronze itself, were related to the experience of a boat-trip in the Scilly Isles, off the coast of Cornwall, and in particular the swirling motion of going round and round in the boat.’