Sphere with Inner Form
Barbara Hepworth
BARBARA HEPWORTH, 1963. BRONZE.
‘There is an inside and outside to every form’, said Barbara Hepworth, ‘… a nut in its shell or a child in the womb’. Hepworth’s sculptures did not deal in such concrete forms - her work is organic, natural, abstract and unrecognisable - but they touch on something universal and infinite. Here, the misshaped form is cradled by the sphere, as if a child in their mother’s stomach, or the first revelation of a Russian doll. The inside of one bronze, patinaed form reveals the outside of another, creating a philosophical mobius strip of sculpture; one work must birth another, it cannot sit empty. Sphere with Inner Form blurs the lines Hepworth herself delineated between inside and outside - it becomes a dialogue between form and void, emptiness and our need to fill it.