27 Quotes by Barbara Hepworth

Body experience... is the centre of creation.

The sculptor must search with passionate intensity for the underlying principle of the organisation of mass and tension - the meaning of gesture and the structure of rhythm.

I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour

The naturalness of life... the sense of community is, I think, a very important factor in an artist's life.

I must always have a clear image of the form of a work before I begin. Otherwise there is no impulse to create.

My left hand is my thinking hand (image), my right hand my doing hand (sequence).

Whenever I am embraced by land and seascape I draw ideas for new sculptures; new forms to touch and walk around, new people to embrace, with an exactitude of form that those without sight can hold and realize... ...It is essentially practical and passionate.

[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. . .

Sculpture is, in the twentieth century, a wide field of experience, with many facets of symbol and material and individual calligraphy. But in all these varied and exciting extensions of our experience we always come back tot the fact that we are human beings of such and such a size, biologically the same as primitive man, and that it is through drawing and observing, or observing and drawing, that we equate our bodies with our landscape.