Barbara Hepworth Cushion 1933/2018

The Hepworth Wakefield have collaborated with Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, and design studio Eve Waldron Design to produce a cushion based on a design by Barbara Hepworth. This has been produced with kind permission from the Barbara Hepworth copyright holders.

The original cushion, held within the Kettle's Yard collection, was made from one of eight handprinted fabrics created by Hepworth in the early 1930s. These fabrics are listed in the catalogue of the joint Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery exhibition she shared with Ben Nicholson in London in October 1933. Kettle's Yard has the only known examples of the handprinted fabric used to make the original cushion.

The linocut design used on the original cushion, sometimes referred to as Stone, appears as a curtain / hanging in a photograph by Paul Laib of Hepworth's sculpture studio annex at The Mall in London.

In Hepworth's statement for the 1934 publication Unit One, she advocated the merging of art and domestic life, writing that "objects that we place near to each other, in their different aspects and relationship create new experience. A scarlet circle on a wall, a slender white bottle on a shelf near it, a bright blue box - all these move about the room and, as they are placed, make the room gay or serious, or bright as a frosty morning."