I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.
Barbara HepworthThe United Nations is our conscience. If it succeeds it is our success. If it fails it is our failure.
Barbara HepworthHalfway through any work, one is often tempted to go off on a tangent. Once you have yielded, you will be tempted to yield again and again... Finally, you would only produce something hybrid.
Barbara HepworthOne must be entirely sensitive to the structure of the material that one is handling. One must yield to it in tiny details of execution, perhaps the handling of the surface or grain, and one must master it as a whole.
Barbara Hepworth[My works are] an imitation of my own past and present and of my own creative vitality as I experience them in one particular instant of my emotional and imaginative life. . .
Barbara HepworthAll my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fullnessess and concavities, through hollows and over peaks - feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and the hollow, the thrust and the contour.
Barbara HepworthMy left hand is my thinking hand. The right is only a motor hand. This holds the hammer. The left hand, the thinking hand, must be relaxed, sensitive. The rhythms of thought pass through the fingers and grip of this hand into the stone.
Barbara HepworthI found one had to do some work every day, even at midnight, because either you're professional or you're not.
Barbara Hepworth