Barbara Hepworth

"Sculpture, to me, is primitive, religious, passionate, and magical."

"Sculpture communicates an immediate sense of life - you can feel the pulse of it. It is perceived, above all, by the sense of touch which is our earliest sensation; and touch gives us a sense of livin…"

"It is easy now to communicate with people through abstraction, and particularly so in sculpture. Since the whole body reacts to its presence, people become themselves a living part of the whole."

"There is an oval sculpture of 1943. I was in despair because my youngest daughter, one of the triplets, had osteomyelitis. In those days the war was on and you couldn't get anything. She was ill for f…"

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

"A chance remark by Ardini, an Italian master carver whom I met there , that 'marble changes colour under different people's hands' made me decide immediately that it was not dominance which one had to…"

"Carving is interrelated masses conveying an emotion; a perfect relationship between the mind and the colour, light and weight which is the stone, made by the hand which feels. It must be so essentiall…"

"All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the forms. Above a…"