[My works are] an imitation of my own past and present and of my own creative vitality as I experience them in one particular instant of my emotional and imaginative life. . .
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.
One must be entirely sensitive to the structure of the material that one is handling. One must yield to it in tiny details of execution, perhaps the handling of the surface or grain, and one must master it as a whole.
I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.
My left hand is my thinking hand. The right is only a motor hand. This holds the hammer. The left hand, the thinking hand, must be relaxed, sensitive. The rhythms of thought pass through the fingers and grip of this hand into the stone.
The sculptor must search with passionate intensity for the underlying principle of the organisation of mass and tension – the meaning of gesture and the structure of rhythm.
![Barbara Hepworth Quote - [My works are] an imitation of my own past and present and of my own creative vitality as I experience them in one particular instant of my emotional and imaginative life. . .](https://minimalistquotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/my-works-are-an-imitation-of-my-own-past-and-prese-683x1024.jpg)
