In our last Kick-About, we channelled the wild colour and restless energy of the Fauves. This week, our focus turns to Barbara Hepworth—an artist of form, balance, and quiet intent. Her sculptures, with their open spaces and smooth tensions, invite us to consider touch, rhythm, and stillness. As always, the works that follow were made in a short time—and for all previous editions of The Kick-About, go here.
Gary Thorne
“The strong presence of Barbara Hepworth — the modernist English artist and sculptor — across two weeks of KA did satisfy a love of research. Yet, with a preference for 2-D work and oil paint, things got complicated. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that everything going into the mixer — wants, needs, hopes, and must-avoids — made it so. It felt a bit like wrestling to get out from inside a rolled-up carpet. In the end, mother’s little helper was some smartphone finger-magic layered over each photo.”
Before #1
After #1
Before #2
After #2
Charly Skilling
Kerfe Roig
“Hepworth’s sculpture immediately brought to mind the expressive brush strokes of ink painting. I also liked the way she sometimes threads them to give them a contrasting texture, so I embroidered on a few of my paintings. I have a pile of more to explore.”
kblog.blog / methodtwomadness.wordpress.com
Itta Howie
“After a week of overthinking and trying too hard, things finally fell into place this morning when I attended Fran Maxwell’s Figuration to Abstraction class. The theme was composition and collage, and I feel this one fits the KA somehow.“
Vanessa Clegg
“Tricky, this one, but in the end I turned my bedroom door into a portal/web. My thinking ranged from funnel-web spiders to Shelob (Lord of the Rings) to openings into another world (Narnia), but as often happens, the basics of getting it done took over, so my imagination was probably ahead of the result…“
vanessaclegg.co.uk / vanillaclegg
Phil Gomm
“A very simple thing from me this week. I acquired some moulds for chocolate Easter eggs – a large one and a small one. I filled one half of the large mould with filler and then pushed the curvature of the smaller mould into the top of the larger filled mould—and left the whole thing to dry. When the time came, I carefully removed the big half from its mould, and then pulled off/out the smaller mould, to reveal a very smooth egg-shaped crater. I then sanded the flat surface of the form to tidy any too-rough edges. That done, it was just a case of photographing the Hepworth-inspired form to capitalise on the various ways in which the ‘hollow’ assumed three-dimensions all of its own.”
philgomm.com / behance.net/Phil_Gomm
Jan Blake
“As the gloom of short days sets in and the autumn colours recede, I find myself driven to hold on to colour for this prompt. I love Barbara Hepworth’s work and have visited her studio in the garden in Cornwall, as well as the Hepworth gallery in Yorkshire, several times, and in many ways this influence probably shows in my own work. I’m more familiar with her sculptures than her paintings, so I chose to share some of my own paintings that reflect her influence while also coming from my long-standing fascination with the Feldenkrais method over the past thirty years — a form of movement and awareness of our own bodies. The last piece edges towards the three-dimensional.“
James Randall
“I’m a longtime fan of Hepworth’s elegant, sparse works, but I suppose I was a bit colour-struck by the previous KA (all your beautiful works were so inspiring). I began by taking Hepworth’s figurative forms as a starting point and put down a little family piece. The next image was of kissing heads, the third was Fido, and I finished with a more elaborate hunting scene.”
Next time, our prompt is something bright, decorative, and a little bit frivolous.
Red's Kingdom 
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