Narrator:

Pelagos by Barbara Hepworth. 1946.

Richard Humphreys:

'Although you might first look at this sculpture and think, well in what way has that anything to do with the landscape? It is indeed a landscape sculpture. Rather unusual in a way. What Hepworth describes is looking out of her studio window across the bay at St Ives and responding to what she describes as the tension she felt between the two arms, the two headlands, which she could see. And she said she tied, as it were, those two arms on the sculpture together with the string to create the feeling that she said of that tension. And the light blue that the interior of the sculpture is painted in is simply to evoke the quality of the sea and the sky. And then the whole ovoid form that she uses, this rather beautiful bit of wood was to create what she felt was a rather enclosed experience. And she, like many of the artists at St Ives, was fascinated by the way in which the landscape could become an image of what was going on inside. You know and at this point of course they were very interested in the ideas of Freud and the subconscious and they were looking for these semi-abstract, or in this case probably more or less completely abstract, images to evoke that rather different view of landscape which is much more to do with the interior of the self. The other thing to say about the strings is that they do also evoke a musical instrument and one sort of makes an association perhaps with ancient Greek instruments. You can almost imagine the wind blowing through those strings and just creating some strange noise. So very beautiful, rather enigmatic object which is based on a response to the landscape.'

Barbara Hepworth
Pelagos - Layer