All things Hepworth...

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One of the lovely added bonuses of the work I do is that I get paid to research things…sometimes they can be things I have no real interest in but not often as I’m a firm believer that it’s possible to find something interesting in just about everything with a little effort and the right kind of presentation…sometimes in some of the more marginalised work I do they can be things that you’d rather not know for and sometimes…well sometimes you start the process and you realise you’ve been given a gift of an opportunity…

The Hepworth project is just such a process…as a firm fan of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park I have been exposed to Barbara Hepworth’s work for most of my adult life…but it’s been a casual relationship…involving very little commitment…since starting work on the devising process that relationship is becoming significantly more serious…
To be honest it’s as much to do with the woman herself as the art she produced.…she’s fascinating for numerous reasons…her great strides as a female artist working at a time when women still had very little voice in the field of contemporary art, her resilience in the face of a number of very real personal tragedies and her determination to stretch her talent, her vision and her art form as far as she possibly could. All of that and she was born and educated just down the road…Wakefield produced such an inspirational woman…a woman who then went on to pursue her learning and development as an artist in Italy and who finally settled in picturesque St Ives in Cornwall…food for thought…

So after getting well and truly caught up in all things Hepworth my next job was to get buy in from the Youth Theatre…a prospect I found vaguely disconcerting…there was no need to…as ever they leapt in to the idea with full force…well the majority did…a few dabbled cautiously at the edges but in the end were happy to take the plunge and the results of such trusting submersion were enough to make me very happy indeed…and to make great progress in the devising process…

Some of the comments that arose in the session will stay with me and they will do so because of their eloquent mix of profundity and realism; any art makes you vulnerable in the making and the observing and the responding, people say they could do it but they haven’t and you can’t look at any art with a blank mind…were just a few of them…just brilliant…

So the process has begun and although we don’t quite know what the final outcome is going to look like we do know that the making of it will educate us, broaden our horizons and make us engage with new knowledge…and if this morning is any indication it will do so with a great deal of humour…not a bad way to spend Saturday mornings…

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