BARBARA HEPWORTH GALLERY WAKEFIELD

I have visited the Gallery twice since the opening last year. 

The first time the additional exhibition was Eva Rothschild ‘Hot Touch’. Her work is very minimalistic and the sculptures are positioned in several rooms.  I am interested in the materials that she uses. ‘Wandering Palms’ is an assemblage of cast component parts of everyday objects.  She also uses in many of her sculptures a substance called Jesmonite, which I was unfamiliar with.  Jesmonite is a water based non-toxic moulding material made of gypsum in acrylic resin.  She used it effectively, for the ‘donut’ sculpture with ceramic tiles, polystyrene and adhesive.

Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures are exquisite to look at with the different forms, woods and materials she uses. I think this part of the exhibition is well curated. You can actually see film of the casting processes and the tools she would have used.  Hepworth said, ‘sculpture is the creation of a real object which relates to our human body and spirit as well as our visual appreciation of form and colour.’

I really like the way she uses plaster on her sculptures.  The surface textures are varied and interesting, expressiveness and variety was of great importance to her. She manipulates wet plaster to ‘imbue it with life and feeling’, when it hardened it was carved using a hatchet or axe.  She opened up her sculptural forms by piercing through materials to create a hole, creating a relationship and play between inside and outside of the form.  This draws the viewers eye in and through the work rather than simply around it.

The second exhibition was the Clare Woods Unquiet Head exhibition.  The huge canvasses drawing on her interest in rock formation consisted of layers of enamel on aluminium which were visually ambiguous in detail, a combination of abstraction and figuration. These have a strong physical presence, and you need to view them from several different angles to engage with the images. and figuration.  I preferred the smaller abstract paintings of three heads again using enamel and oil on aluminium.  The colours worked well on each painting and the three paintings were interesting to view together.

However, on both occasions I felt that Hepworths work was the highlight of the Gallery.