the Hepworth Museum

and a book

I will be brutally honest and risk a lot of you thinking I am woefully superficial but I will confess now I had never really thought a great deal about Barbara Hepworth’s work before. I will even admit, to my shame, that I had lumped it (in my head) with that of Henry Moore and somehow exploring either hadn’t ever been a priority.

On my first day in St Ives I walked past the museum devoted to her work and raised an eyebrow at the entry fee (£8). Yesterday I wandered back along the same route and (thank goodness) told myself that seeing I was in St Ives it would be foolish not to pop in. It was not so much the small museum exhibit that blew my mind, but being able to see into her studio, and gaze on her collections of tools and wander around her garden that did it. So much so that I went back and handed over a further £8 for another look today, and sat a long while in her tiny greenhouse at the top of the garden, making contour drawings of the trees and having a jolly good think.

Here’s a wee video I edited last night. Turn the volume off if you don’t want to listen to birds wittering away. I added them from the audio collection on my phone, because the actual sound on the video was chatter from all the teenage school students that I was avoiding getting into the viewfinder as much as possible. Quite aside from it being illegal to film young people without all sorts of consents my intention was to record the garden and the sculptures, not them.