Close-up of part of Four-Square (Walk Through) (1966): Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden, St Ives, Cornwall
Four-Square (Walk Through), 1966: environmental sculpture. Edwin Mullins observed in 1970 'that it is never impersonal, or merely architectural in function. It is ... conceived as something the spectator may inhabit ... so that he may feel the sculpture to be an actual extension of himself'. As the title indicates, the sculpture is there to be walked on and passed through'. Barbara Hepworth wanted 'people to feel the apertures' of her work and went on to acknowledge in relation to Four-Square (Walk Through): 'I wanted to involve people, make them reach to the surfaces and the size, finding out which spiral goes which way, realising the differences between the parts'. In 1967, shortly after the completion of the work, Mullins reported: 'This piece emphasises her insistence that the whole body must be engaged in response to sculpture. This engagement helps to orientate us - give us as image of security and a sense of architecture'. On another occasion Hepworth said 'You can't look at sculpture if you don't move, experience it from all vantage-points, see how the light enters it and changes the emphasis.' If Hepworth's unique invitation to 'walk through' one of her sculptures captured both a sense of the human scale and a wider 'humanism', she admitted that the monumentality of Four-Square (Walk Through) and associated works was born of a confrontation with mortality. At the time she was fighting against cancer in 1966. 'Yes of course it was related. If you're very ill or something's threatening, you want to put something down for big work while you can. I was in an absolute fever of ideas, without much hope of fulfilment'.
Size: 5120px × 3413px
Location: Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden, St. Ives. Cornwall, UK
Photo credit: © will Perrett / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
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