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Calm forms



Today I visited the Babara Hepworth Museum and Garden in St Ives on a cold, clear day where the light was that the artists, drawn here, most deeply sought. It has a high, quietly penetrating quality that brings out the subtlest of colouring.

Hepworth was a sculptor of ideal form - seeking the perfect instantiation of landscape and body, the abiding reality under the fluid life of appearances. She succeeded beautifully. Each carved stone, piece of wood, has a rightness about it as if only that form, and no other, could emerge from precisely that piece. They have a calm inevitability about them.

They sit here in a beautifully contained garden, a haven of  stillness, close by the bustling community of the town, where she could work, shape contemplate, part of a place yet apart.



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