Barbara Hepworth's Letters

"Touch gives us a sense of living contact"

Sinclair, Jeanie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-9823-7235 (2025) Barbara Hepworth's Letters. In: Dress Devolution 3: Still playing dress-up: age, clothing and costume, 3rd-4th July 2025, Falmouth University. (Unpublished)

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Abstract / Summary

As a historian, being able to view digitised archives online enables me to look at artefacts that I might otherwise not be able to see. However, in an increasingly digitised world what is lost when we can’t see the paper artefact? This paper looks at the how Barbara Hepworth’s letters show the importance of touch and celebrates the lost intimacy of the letter. Barbara Hepworth regularly wrote letters to her friend Janet Slack, who lived just outside St Ives, and some of these letters are held in the collection of St Ives archive. Barbara Hepworth wrote of sculpture in 1959 that it ‘is perceived, above all, by the sense of touch which is our earliest sensation; and touch gives us a sense of living contact and security’. Touch was, for Hepworth, not only an essential part of the way we experience the world, but also how we understand and experience her sculpture. Touching Hepworth’s letters, in turn, creates a sense of connection across time, and the aura of the object and its presence in time and space evokes alternative readings encompassing affects that are lost in the digital archive object. In what way does the artefact’s presence change the way we understand them? What does ‘living contact’ as a research method reveal that the digital artefact cannot? This paper argues for the importance of touch, and the haptic experience of viewing letters in in the intimate space of the archive.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Subjects:	Art History & Theory Creative Art & Design > Fashion, Textiles & Costume Design
Department:	Falmouth School of Art
Depositing User:	Jeanie Sinclair
Date Deposited:	15 Dec 2025 12:29
Last Modified:	15 Dec 2025 12:29
URI:	https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/6230

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