Gabo first came to England in 1935, and spent the war years living in Cornwall. It was in St Ives that he began to use nylon filament in his sculpture. Space and time remained his main artistic preoccupations and he aimed to produce a self-contained object that would suggest the universal and infinite. Writing of Gabo’s work, the critic Herbert Read said that it hovered ‘between the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial’, becoming ‘the crystallization of the purest sensibility’.