In the year 1965, Barbara Hepworth, the artist who made all these amazing sculptures, died in a fire at her studios in St Ives, Cornwall. Since then, her studio has been restored and opened up to the public.
In January, 2010 I had the pleasure of visiting this studio. It was a cold, blustery day, so my boyfriend and I had the place to ourselves. The garden is filled with her sculptures which we spent ages looking at, sharing our opinions.
Perhaps the strangest thing is her workshop, which stands still in history, unchanged from the day she left it. The calender reads May '65. The tools lay on the bench next to the unfinished sculpture, waiting to be picked up again.
Hepworth was 72 when she died and had a lot of help making her sculptors by that time. But her memory is held in that place, held in her sculptors, both complete and incomplete.
If you get a chance, take a trip down there. St Ives is a beautiful place with art, the sea and a cream tea waiting for you!
If St Ives isn't your thing, try the new Gallery, The Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire. It opens in May 2011 and will be home to rarely seen works by Hepworth as well as pieces by Turner and Henry Moore. If it's British art you're after, look no further.
No comments:
Post a Comment