Two rotating forms II is a two-piece alabaster carving from a productive period of Barbara Hepworth’s career in which she began to receive growing critical and popular acclaim. During the nineteen-sixties, museum exhibitions, commercial demand and public commissions elevated her reputation and corresponded with greater fluency and productivity in her work. Hepworth continued to make large and small sculptures concurrently, and Two rotating forms II belongs to a sequence of hand-sized sculptures in alabaster that Hepworth made from 1958 until the mid-sixties.

This work is closely related to Two rotating forms [BH 414], which was made immediately beforehand. In that work, both alabaster forms are upright and have rounded edges, in contrast to Two rotating forms II, in which the larger piece tapers outwards at the top of the form to produce acute angles. Another key difference between the works is that the larger form of the latter is pierced with a hole or aperture. Hepworth did not make preparatory designs for her sculptures but claimed to complete a work in her imagination before beginning to realise it in a tangible form. This cerebral process encouraged her to realise the same idea in multiple, subtly varied versions. This aspect of her work became increasingly pronounced during the sixties. Reflecting on the preceding decade of her career in 1970, she said ‘there are often different interpretations of an idea. If I have not been able to explore all the possibilities of the shape, I’ll do another one and see what happens.’ She likened the relationship between such works to ‘a basket of eggs: you never find two eggs of the same shape.’

The serial, cyclical quality of Hepworth’s work is evident in the multiple forms of Two rotating forms II and other alabaster works of a similar date. Hepworth first made two- and three-part sculptures in the early nineteen-thirties and continued to do so, but in the sixties she began to create more extended, family-like sequences of forms. The year before Two rotating forms II, she made another alabaster carving called Six forms in echelon [BH 402]. It indicates the more extravagant formal effects that simple forms could be used to achieve, and shows that the multi-form approach in Two rotating forms II belonged to a wider channel of creative exploration, in which the relationship of forms was just as important as the quality of forms themselves.

Six forms in echelon used shallow, ovoid, round-edged forms, which are synonymous with the smaller stone in Two rotating forms II. These elementary forms compare with certain organic and mineral forms—of eggs, stones—and they evoke fertility, reproduction, multiplicity. To Hepworth, they symbolised the pulse essential to life. Relatedly, such forms also addressed the sense of touch. All of Hepworth’s alabaster carvings are examples of ‘hand sculpture’, as she defined it. Throughout her maturity as a sculptor, she insisted that there were three ‘different degrees of size in sculpture’. The first of these was ‘the small intimate “hand sculpture”, small enough to carry about, appealing to the sense of touch as well as to the eyes and finding its position in a house very easily.’ In Hepworth’s small-scale sculptures, the gentle sense of animation was inseparably both a visual and a tactile quality.

Complementary to the tactile quality of Hepworth’s stone carving was the quality of movement. Two rotating forms II does not literally rotate. But three years earlier Hepworth made another two-part alabaster carving called Goonhilly September (1963) [BH 342], in which one of the forms was bolted to the base so that the form could be turned in a rotating movement, thus encouraging viewers’ haptic interaction with the work. Of this work, Hepworth noted in her sculpture records that ‘the oval form turns’, and this rotary movement was an allusion to the rotating satellite receiver dishes at Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall. No specific allusion has yet been identified for the implied rotary movement of Two rotating forms II, but extraterrestrial connotations—of space, flight, orbits—were recurrent themes in other works of the period. The title of Two rotating forms II and its similar format to Goonhilly September invite a comparison with that work.

The art historian A. M. Hammacher noted the vernacular aspect of alabaster and argued that Barbara Hepworth was continuing ‘the very old English tradition of carving in alabaster’. Alabaster carving began in England before the Reformation and was used to make Christian devotional imagery suitable as domestic altarpieces. There was considerable activity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries around Nottingham, where there was a rich supply of the material. Hepworth used alabaster in several extended phases, most numerously during 1929–34 and 1958–64. She typically used the material to create ‘closed form’ sculpture, which often involved a smooth rounded mass with internal apertures or openings. Alabaster was especially appropriate to this genre of her sculpture since the stone is comparatively soft and delicate, and therefore unsuitable for more complex extended forms such as she explored in brass and bronze.

The media of alabaster and bronze were not incompatible in Hepworth’s practice, however. The alabaster carvings she made in the early sixties led directly into a concurrent group of formally similar bronze works. Several polished bronzes of 1961 and 1962 were made simultaneously to hand-sized alabaster carvings, and these works are closely related in their compact, amorphous shapes and their precious, luminous surface qualities. One polished bronze, Sphere and hemisphere (1962) [BH 319b], was even translated from an alabaster carving of identical shape and size [BH 319a]. In Two rotating forms II, which was made a few years later, Hepworth was continuing to explore the sculptural effects which animated her work in polished bronze.

When Two rotating forms II was exhibited in Hepworth’s solo exhibition with Gimpel Fils in 1966, it was dated to 1965–66. However, the artist herself dated it to 1966 in her sculpture records. The same exhibition illustrated the wide range of materials that Hepworth was using at the time and other sculptures were made of bronze, Carrara marble, Seravezza marble, Swedish green marble, Roman stone, slate and elm.