 Hello. Just a few tips of tea, and suddenly everything is different again. So we're going to begin our final couple of sessions. And I'm really pleased to be able to introduce Katie Norris, who's mentioned earlier. She is a newly joined curator of exhibitions and displays that takes on Ives. a mae'n gweithio i gyd yn ei gweithio'r cerddau i gyd yn teimlo a i gyda Bristol. Mae'r ddau ddau'r gweithio ar gyfer y link ar gyfer y gweithio a'r rôl i gweithio yng Nghymru ar y cerddau yma ar y cerddau yma ac mae'n gweld y cyfnodd y gallu gyda'r Gwyrtaeth Pallant House Gallary ac mae'n cyfrifio'r bwysig o'r ddau ar y bwysig Brithys wedi gweithio Sylvia Panckhurst a Christopher Wood. I'm delighted that we could have worked on this together, Katie, and that you have produced something unique and new for us, so thanks very much, and over to you. All right, thank you. OK, so yes, I guess I just wanted to reflect now at this point in the day about how fantastic all the speakers have been so far and how much we've kind of broadened out this question about motherhood and expanded it in so many different ways, and it's really, it's been wonderful kind of for me to come in at this point because we've really created such an embracing and really wonderful atmosphere for everybody to share their different experiences. So I guess one thing that I'm going to touch upon here is about Hepworth and her loss, so the loss of her son, Paul Sgeeping. And I'm doing this from a position of grief and loss of myself, so I lost my little boy a couple of years ago, so it's quite fresh, it's quite new, and so in a way what I'm doing with this really is exploring my own discipline, which is art history and curating, and thinking about how we tell stories and thinking about the position that I'm in now, what stories should I tell in this role, and what value would it bring to incorporate these otherness into the stories that people see in galleries? So in a way what I want to do is, I'm going to bring it back to curating art history, having gone all over the place with so many fantastic talks, but with my own kind of specialism, really to just sort of think about that question, about kind of reading against those kind of conventional stories that we know about Hepworth and the different ways that we understand her practice, and what would it mean to incorporate the idea of bereavement into that understanding of Hepworth that is so commonly out there and what we all kind of know about Hepworth? So, and I guess also just to say that, you know, part of our thinking when Malyn and I spoke about this was to question how does it feel to walk into a gallery and sort of see these mother and child sculptures, like how does that make one feel if you haven't had the kind of conventional experience of motherhood, and so that's something I also really identify with, but I am aware also of this other part of Hepworth's life, and that story's only ever really partially told, you know, the death of her son, and that was, actually, it was a child from her first marriage to John Skeeping, and some of you who were here yesterday would have seen some photographs of them together, which is quite funny, actually. But unlike many, I think some people know some details about Paul Skeeping. There's often sort of quoted within the literature that he had died in his early 20s in 1953, so just after the Second World War, and he was a navigator with the RAF and died flying over Thailand just after the conflict ended. But I suppose you don't really get a sense of how that loss might have had an enduring impact on Hepworth's art and life. It's kind of like a sort of biographical mention segue, and then sort of quickly resolved and you kind of move on. And I suppose the fact that I understand and know my own grief, that's not really how things go and that you live with this for your life, and that you learn to live with it, and that's something I want to explore. I'm still in the early stages of myself, so it's kind of interpretive. But I really did also respond to a quote when I kind of looked to the literature about this situation, this occurrence in Hepworth's life, and somebody had sort of said quite flippantly, I suppose, that her sorrow had dried into a dull weight, and that's just how it happens. That's what happens to those who are left behind. And that interpretation doesn't really fit with how I have experienced grief, and not really also what I could observe in what Hepworth was doing. I mean, she was incredibly prolific in the post-war period after the death of her son. And, you know, is it really the case that grief for her became so immutable and such a heavy thing that it limited her life? And did she, the idea that she had successes in spite of this loss? And I guess I think perhaps it was precisely because of this loss and the kind of profundity of the experience she went through that added to her art. So I'm going to look at the kind of early stages of Hepworth's bereavement and the ways that she incorporated this kind of process of loss and not as something that's repressed or kind of put to one side as a separate part of her life to overcome, but actually which sort of formed a kind of cornerstone of her identity, both her creative and her personal identity. So it's going to be kind of narrative and storytelling in a way, and that's part of it as well, that I am sort of in a way telling a story like how we do with art history, but it's just sort of reading against the kind of traditional stories that we might often associate with Hepworth. So, first slide. In 1953, Barbara Hepworth sent a hurried letter to her oldest and closest friend, Margaret Gardner, from her home in St Ives. Scrawled across the side of a single note card, it read simply, Margaret, darling, a telegram has just come and Paul has been killed in Thailand. Those correspondence that had been sent between Gardner and Hepworth up until this point reflects a rich and enduring friendship. Between them, over the course of a decade, they had exchanged long conversational letters in which words flowed easily between them. Hepworth sent details of her art and life, moving between subjects as various as new sculpture commissions, her relations with the art world in London, her family, and more recently, the breakdown of her marriage with Ben Nicholson. The letter in 1953 then is very different, a rupture from everything that had gone before. One is struck by the directness of her statement. It seems to reflect Hepworth's need to get the information out, plainly and simply into the world, thus in some way recognising this new and terrible reality without her son. There is desperation too, even in this short note, and perhaps above all, the deep-rooted trust she placed in Gardner when she wrote imploringly to her friend, her son's sudden and unexpected death. Naturally, Gardner offered to come as soon as possible, but Hepworth put her off. Another friend was already travelling from London and in any case, Hepworth wrote, she felt quite useless. I have been in a state of collapse, she explained, when neither my head nor my knees would do what I willed. In the days that followed, Gardner received further correspondence from St Ives. In the first of two instalments, written on the 15th, actually I've also just moved this on, so we can see a picture of Margaret Gardner. So two instalments written on the 15th that were simply headed Sunday, Hepworth tried to communicate something of her intense emotional and physical reaction. She wrote of persistent vivid memories, the beauty of her son, which she speculated only the poet Rilke, and perhaps Gardner, who had known Paul since a little boy, would understand. His vitality and radiance, the light he always brought to a room, Hepworth wrote, was something she so depended on, that she now found so difficult to square with his premature death. The impossibility of the situation, she wrote, caused her such unspeakable anguish. My whole being cries out against this. Even under such duress, Hepworth tried to offer some reassurance to her friend. She had drawn comfort, she told Gardner, from the local community in St Ives. On the Friday, a requiem had been held at the local church, which gave her some peace. The unquietness around my studio was stilled, she wrote. One just has to accept. In these profound and heartfelt letters, we get the sense of Hepworth caught in the first stages of grief. The immediate incomprehensibility of the situation, and the magnitude of her loss, as Paul's mother seems to emanate through the correspondence in Waves. It comes through most strongly in the way she physically shut down, a refusal at least in her body to register what was happening. There is the question too of acceptance, raised here tentatively and in a non-committal way, as much a statement of necessity and survival as anything Hepworth seemed to truly believe. The way that Hepworth responded in the succeeding days and months after the immediate shock of Paul's death is difficult to gauge. To some extent, her reaction during this time seemed to have been governed by the social expectations of the period. The compulsion to manage grief internally was an accepted strategy in Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War when self-control, stoicism and privileging the needs of the wartime community had been promoted as the most patriotic response to bereavement. This attitude was applied particularly to women since they hadn't only become to standards sort of symbolically as natural harbingers for the nation's mourning but also believed to be more susceptible to overwhelming emotion. This so-called emotional economy imposed upon women can be recognised in some ways in the way that Hepworth behaved and articulated her experience of loss at least outwardly. The need to appear as though she was continuing with life was a real and tangible concern for her. In a letter she sent to Gardner in July just after their first meeting following Paul's death Hepworth apologised for breaking down in front of her. Such a terrible bore for you, she wrote. Nevertheless, amongst close companions such as Gardner Hepworth seemed to have been able to open up. In July she wrote to her friends Ernan and Phyllis Forbes Dennis that she had reached rock bottom. They wrote back declaring all love and admiration and sympathy and trying to offer Hepworth hope despite her obvious despair. We were worrying about you Ernan wrote on the 25th of July but if you have reached rock bottom then we will not anymore because that is the place where real building can be done. If all your wonderful executive power can be turned towards acceptance and surrender instead of the bitter fight against inevitable the future will become clear. It might seem to us today that Ernan's letter contains a troubling lack of compassion but there is more than the kind of keep calm and carry on sentiment in his words. He communicates a deeper and more caring message about acceptance as a means for easing the immense pain caused by the death of the loved one. To some extent Hepworth touched upon this philosophy herself. Although she rarely directly addressed her bereavement she did recognise that her art often came from experiences of crisis. The way she reconciled with adversity Hepworth stated provided the moral climate in which her sculpture was produced in which it was produced since it sharpened her ideals and reconnected her with her central values. I would suggest that the loss of Paul perhaps more than any other event in her life caused her to recalibrate and rescender her release and values. Her experience became deeply embedded at the core of how she thought about herself, her work and its place within the world. That Paul's death might be incorporated into Hepworth's belief system and ultimately her sculpture requires some level of readjustment in terms of how we think about her art. In her seminal book Mother Stone the art historian Anne Wagner showed that for Hepworth and her generation of modernist sculptors the theme of maternity together with essentialist concepts about women and their inherent place as life-givers was the root of artistic innovations. During the height of their experimentations in direct carving during the 1920s and 30s people like Maureen Epstein alongside Hepworth sculpted abstract and figurative depictions of pregnant women and mother-and-child motifs in wooden stone. Their work expressed sculpture's vitality and its capacity as a rejuvenating force for a society still mired by the devastation of the First World War. Hepworth then with a young child, Paul readily took up this mantle. She created a number of two-part sculptures and we've seen some of these today already. There's a couple I've added in here. These are two-part sculptures one in alabaster here and one in ancastr stone in which small forms are unfolded, nurtured and protected by a larger one. These components can be reconfigured but they always belong to one another fitting together as a single whole. They suggest that ultimately mothers and their children, in jurors one they are not meant to be parted. When we contemplate these works which are so life-affirming in their representation of wholeness and balance it is impossible to imagine that physical separation through the death of a child might potentially be part of Hepworth's formal vocabulary in the future. However, in the wake of World War II Hepworth had already been forced to confront concepts related to death and grief a bait beyond her own personal experience. The legacy of collective traumas such as Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Holocaust had a destabling impact on her and her art. Hepworth stated it is hopeless to presume that I or anybody thinks the same as in 1936 either about art, philosophy or religion. But she also continued to view her art as a purposeful life-giving force in the face of such destruction. She stated that she saw her sculptures as a consolidation of faith in living values and a completely logical way of expressing the intrinsic will to life. By making sculpture she was giving form to these ideals thus bringing them physically into existence. Good things always seem so concrete to me she said, bad things seem amorphous. Paul's death and the profound feeling of absence that this produced for Hepworth was with doubt doubt the single biggest challenge to her positivist ethos. It is perhaps understandable then that her first artistic response was to approach her personal grief through the rubric of wider social experience. Created in the months after Paul's death Madonna and Child was dedicated to him but it also spoke to the public sense of loss shared by the community after the Second World War. Gifted to St Ives Church it was placed in the Lady's Chapel where it still is and it became a focus for communal mourning. As a stone carving Madonna and Child conformed to the artistic language of modern war memorials that were erected in villages throughout Britain both world wars but the focus on the Madonna and motherhood is more unusual. The image represents Mary contemplating and even ultimately accepting the future death of her child for the sake of humanity. With this focus on sacrifice Hepworth no doubt had in mind those women who had lost their sons during the war as well as her own personal grief. Through her indirect religious symbolism she sensitively bought the under-recognised experience of bereaved mothers into public consciousness. While the knowledge of separation through death weighs upon this sculpture there is also lightness in the way that Hepworth has described the figures the deep bond between mother and child is reinforced through the charge points of contact their arms embracing and also the way that Mary rests her cheek on her baby's head. While Hepworth's carvings of the 1930s have a physical weight in materiality that is almost kind of bodily her Madonna and child sculpture is not so visceral the effect is almost transcendent of earthly life and it has that sense of going beyond the earthly with this kind of image and that would no doubt have offered comfort to Hepworth and to her public in the wake of war. So in that way Madonna and Child has the same affirmative impact as her earlier mother and child sculptures however here bereavement is incorporated into the narrative of motherhood and given meaning through the concepts of necessary sacrifice and communal wellbeing. Elsewhere Hepworth's mother and child sculpture has been interpreted as a kind of final statement the kind of ultimate statement that she made around this time of Paul's death and where she kind of conflated her own loss with this collective experience of the nation and ultimately there's a kind of message of hope and regeneration but privately at this process and her own reconciliation with the circumstances around Paul's death were obviously more complicated and I think more difficult for her to manage. Hepworth's sculptural assistant David Lewis said that far from reaching any sense of closure Hepworth's grief transformed into an inner nurturing a quietness and a rhythm from deep within herself. So I want to suspend the rest of this talk thinking about this ongoing experience of bereavement that that quote kind of alludes to. So while the process never really reaches its conclusion and Gardiner said of Hepworth that Paul's death was her lasting grief I think the description given by Lewis her sculptural assistant does at least suggest that we can look beyond that idea that her sorrow was nothing more than a dull dry weight that was inhibiting to her life and career. There's this kind of sense of her continual search for understanding and acceptance that it activated an inner nurturing or deep rhythm and that feels really compelling to me because it suggests a much more dynamic relationship with grief that can sometimes even be productive or fulfilling. So in the months after the creation of the Madonna and Child there were other works that we can trace her dealing with Paul's death and particularly the two figures heroes which is at the Barbara Hepworth Museum this monolith Imperium which is this kind of nine foot carving limestone carving and this photograph is of Hepworth with the sculpture at a Whitechapel retrospective in 1954 so it was quite... both works were major works that she exhibited at that time and I think these works sort of they show Hepworth trying to find ways of sort of simultaneously holding on to and letting go of Paul's physical experience and she sort of depicts his likeness through these different forms of abstraction so for example in the two figures painting the figures are sort of elongated with these intersecting straight lines and the left hand person holds a small picture which echoes the abstract forms that you can see in the painting and Hepworth actually clearly linked the figures and this composition to her son she inscribed the painting with a dedication that read Paul and John pilot and navigator killed February 13th 1953 and John was as Paul's navigator when they were flying so it could be that Paul is represented by one of the figures in the larger painting or he may be contained within the smaller image and this device of using a picture within a picture has historically been used to include people otherwise absent notably in sort of family portraits or deceased family member within a photograph and to me this kind of invocation of memory draws me back to those vivid and persistent reflections that Hepworth had of Paul and that she described in her letter to Gardner shortly after his loss and also it kind of ties to poetry so in the letters that I quoted at the beginning she quotes Rilke and he was a great influence on her and the hero's title also refers to his writings so Rilke frequently alludes to heroes within his poetry as tragic noble figures who characteristically have a fleeting though no less powerful impact on the world he summarised their transient beauty when he wrote the hero is strangely close to those who died young permanent does not concern him unlike ordinary people the hero according to Rilke lives in continual ascent moving far beyond the mundane earthly realm so the idea of ascent of course had particular resonance for Hepworth because of Paul's profession but despite the tragic circumstances of his death she came to venerate his interest in flying observing a parallel between the way he embraced scientific advancement in aviation and her own interest in human progress and enlightenment in a statement that she wrote in relation to the monolith sculpture Hepworth introduced the idea of hero ascent again when she applauded those who seek freedom in the upper air even though it involved fire and falling earthwards she also made a further illusion this time through the analogy of organic growth writing we have deep roots but our growth beyond the surface towards an uncertain light containing great sadness although the power to seek the light and motivation so on one level these analogies relate to Paul and his embrace of new technologies but we might also connect her words to her own struggle for understanding and acceptance after his death we are reminded of the great sadness she endured but also the compulsion to seek out light even in the darkness as if to underline this point Hepworth carved interconnected hollows through the head and stomach of monolith which she posited as the bridge between the body and the mind seeking comprehension she also suggested that the looming figure should be placed outdoors on some high summer as though forming a bridge between the earthly and heavenly realms in this way she drew connections between the process of enlightenment or reconciliation through greater understanding and a connection to a higher cosmos or plane of existence here again we find Hepworth looking outside herself to find meaning yet unlike the certainty of the Christian symbolism which underpinned the Madonna and Child we now see a more far reaching exploration both deep within herself and the natural world and wider universe this emerging response to her loss was solidified when she travelled to Greece in the summer of 1954 the trip organised by Gardner was intended to lift Hepworth at least temporarily out of her emotional turbulence by connecting her with a place, culture and history that had been a source of lifelong inspiration the holiday ended up being a veritable tour of Greece and the mainland and islands they visited over one fortnight Athens, Meissanide, Delphi, Crete, Rhodes and Santorini Hepworth recorded her voyage in annotated sketchbooks scribbling her observations around the margins in long free-flowing notes that were later worked up into poems and published while in England Hepworth had been deeply embedded in emotion on professional pressures in Greece she faced an altogether more fundamental struggle that exhilarated her she contended with dramatic weather conditions and inhospitable terrain facing angry ferocious winds and delos and scrambling up a mountainside in Patmos Hepworth reveled in these challenges as well as in her newfound sense of isolation which contrasted so much with the social pressures in England In her sketchbook she wrote of her joy in being anti-social I can't help it she wrote I try to escape all contact and proper human obligations I must find and hold in these brief hours a silent, exultant pleasure Hepworth's biographer Sally Festing has emphasised how the Greek tour marked a shift in the artist's position in relation to her grief In a world of pure existence where there is no past or future no end, no limit, no separation or parting, no death as it is usually conceived Hepworth at last seemed to find some relief It is not that she totally reconciled with Paul's death but she seems to have finally succeeded in reconnecting with herself and her values as part of this new reality without her son Greece, with its eternal landscape and ancient past provides a framework that allowed her to philosophise on her own existence as well as death as part of life's cycle This idea is reaffirmed by a note that Hepworth added on her Greek experience in 1964 in which she detailed her impressions of Delphi Standing alone in a stadium below Olympus she wrote I felt at ease both physically and spiritually This experience of being part of Mount Olympus part of the Plain of Ithia and totally alone did perhaps justify my existence To describe the day would be to dissipate the visual memory instead I hold it to sustain me Hepworth did of course carry on and carry forward these experiences and lessons in the years and decades after she returned from Greece We see it broadly in the way that she took up her single form motif with new vigor in the 1960s interrogating through various deviations of her towering Standing figure, the concept of the individual within society and the natural world and actually I've chosen, there's many to choose from as I'm sure you've seen from the exhibition but I've chosen this ascending form which obviously really resonates with that interest in ascendance that comes from my mind directly from this period of grief and loss and then in 1971 she specifically synthesised her visit to Greece into a series of nine lithographs entitled the Aegean Suite Each one titled after a site she had visited which described in abstract form her elemental experience of ascent, isolation and pure existence These works I think demonstrate that over the remaining decades of Hepworth's life the process of her personal bereavement together with other aspects of her life became part of the artist's rich form of vocabulary that was embedded in her wider value system I just want to end with this sculpture, Configuration Fera and this actually belongs to a series of sculpture that Hepworth carved after her return from Greece in this amazing material, this Nigerian Guerrera wood I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right which she did this whole series each with a kind of Greek reference again with the title and they're really highly evocative sensual works they're actually scented so they almost have a kind of smell to them and she was sort of polishing down and smoothing out this wood and in this particular one the centre is almost hollowed or scooped out and it was intended to echo the kind of unfolding circular forms of the amphitheaters that she saw in Greece and at the centre she has this kind of pierced hole so you've got this kind of very solid embrace and at the centre this absence and so for me in terms of being interpretive it reminds me about grief and the nature of grief that it doesn't go away and it never really diminishes in size but rather we might find ways of building our lives around the hole that's left by someone that's no longer with us so almost much like Hepworth's pierced sculptures she seemed to find a framework for living around this intolerable reality of Paul's absence and she was able to frame and philosophise her loss and so I think in this we can find some hope and also this kind of reinforcement that art can be a bridging for understanding and that we can read into it in so many different ways and I think with someone like Hepworth we're only just really touching the surface of how rich that could be