InSight considers one of the rare sculptures that Barbara Hepworth made from gold, now on display in Piano Nobile’s exhibition of Hepworth’s stringed sculptures.
InSight No. 165
Barbara Hepworth, Three curves with strings (Gold Mincarlo), 1971
Looking out across the Atlantic Ocean from the western fringes of the Isles of Scilly, there is a small uninhabited rock called Mincarlo. It forms part of the Norrard Rocks and receives little attention but for those attracted by its nesting birdlife, which includes cormorants and puffins. Amongst the twitchers and ornithologists, a notable exception was the sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975), who lived in St Ives from 1939 and occasionally visited the Isles of Scilly later in her life.
Hepworth adopted the appellation ‘Mincarlo’ in the title of four narrowly similar sculptures made in 1971. The four works differed primarily in their materials—gold, aluminium, brass, polished bronze. They were the last of her sculptures with string, a material she first used with sculpture in 1939. A decade earlier, another pair of stringed sculptures made titular reference to one of the larger, inhabited islands in the Scilly archipelago. Curved form (Bryher) and a larger version, Curved form (Bryher II), were discussed by Hepworth in a conversation with her son-in-law Alan Bowness: ‘Bryher is being in a boat, and sailing round Bryher, and the water, the island, the movement of course.’ When used in this way, Hepworth’s titles register a deeply personal, subjective interpretation of the universal, abstract forms of her work. The Mincarlo sculptures may also have registered for her a boat-bound experience of this Scillonian rock. She herself acknowledged the partiality of such titles, explaining that they were ‘always added later’. ‘[W]hen I’ve made something, I think: where did I get that idea from? And then I remember.’
Between 1966 and 1971, most of Hepworth’s stringed sculptures addressed the sun and the moon. These reference points registered in the materials of the disc: the cool silver of brushed aluminium evoked the moon; the warmth and brilliance of polished bronze, brass or gold suggested the sun. Later in life Hepworth became acutely aware of how her sculptures behaved differently under the influence of direct sun and moonlight. The movement of celestial bodies, partly expressed in the tides around her home in St Ives, was an implicit preoccupation of the gaze she levelled on her sculptures. ‘I think sculpture grows in the open light and with the movement of the sun its aspect is always changing’, Hepworth wrote in 1963. As with much of her art in this period, the ‘Mincarlo’ works married the austere formality of constructivism with sparkling, baroque creativity charged with thoughts of the cosmos and even space travel.
Having first used bronze for two early works made in 1927 and 1928, Hepworth began to use it consistently from 1956 until her death. She initially preferred a deep green patination redolent of the sea, but in 1959 she made her first sculpture in polished bronze. With small-scale ‘hand’ sculptures such as Pierced round form (1959), a brilliant, mirror-like surface transfigured the object from the realm of art to that of totems and idols. Hepworth evidently appreciated the reflectivity and seeming preciousness of the polished finish, and her few sculptures made with solid gold—three works in all—manifest and deepen the qualities of her polished bronze sculpture. Her first gold sculpture, Sun and moon (1966), was commissioned by Cornwall County Council as a gift for Queen Elizabeth II, and a second gold work, Single form (Sun and moon), was made in the same year. Both were unique, whereas Three curves with strings (Gold Mincarlo) was produced in an edition of twelve in response to a commission from the Morris Singer Sculpture Association.
In 1956, Hepworth conceived a new sculptural idiom in works such as Orpheus and Curlew, which were made from curving sheets of brass held in tension by spiralling patterns of string. The combination of string and thin, canted sheets of metal in the ‘Mincarlo’ works was a development of those earlier brass sculptures. These later works simultaneously simplified and complicated that earlier idiom. The sheets of metal were cut or cast in elementary circles, then pierced with circular apertures, and the plane held in an upright position. In Three curves with strings (Gold Mincarlo), the highly reflective surface doubles the visual presence of the spiralling strings. The alignment of apertures creates partial sightlines between neighbouring compartments. The disposition of the three canted discs, although themselves flattened and weightless, suggests the volumetric character of a perfect sphere. As Hepworth entered the final years of her life, her handling of materials, shapes and volumes became ever more simple, layered, sophisticated and controlled. In the ‘Mincarlo’ works, she found a sense of poise between shape and volume, plane and mass, balanced on the memory of a visit to the Isles of Scilly.
Images:
Mincarlo in the Isles of Scilly, photographed by Michael Harpur © Michael Harpur
Map of the Isles of Scilly
Barbara Hepworth with the plaster of Curved form (Bryher II), 1961, photographed by Studio St Ives © Bowness
Barbara Hepworth, Disc with strings (Sun), 1969, Private Collection
Installation photograph of Three curves with strings (Gold Mincarlo) at Piano Nobile
