Barbara Hepworth began her career as a sculptor in London in the late 1920s, and quickly established herself in the vanguard of the modern movement.

Caught in St Ives by the outbreak of the war, she went on to spend thirty-six years - exactly half her life - in the town.

Hepworth came to value the sense of community she found in St Ives, but it was this very rootedness that allowed her to develop sculpture for the national and international stage.