Location, location, location... by Eve Lockett

Last month, we spent a week in a small cottage not far from St Ives in Cornwall. During the one wet day of our holiday we visited Barbara Hepworth’s studio and garden to enjoy her sculptures and pick up the atmosphere of the place where she worked. It happened we arrived just as a guide was beginning her talk, and we joined the group, steaming gently as we 

dried out.

Hepworth’s own writings express how her relationship with nature, and St Ives in particular, was integral to her work. She discovered in St Ives a likeness to the North Yorkshire coast where she holidayed as a child, but with the additional quality of Cornish light. The seashore, the cliffs, the pebbles, the waves and the sky all provided her with endless inspiration. She also created her own unique and exquisite garden to complement her sculptures. In the mild Cornish climate, Hepworth was able to work outdoors on her sculpting all 

year round.

This love of the world around her was bound up with her understanding of her work in terms of spirituality. She said she used to worry that a sculptor was the maker of graven images, but decided it was only a sin when ‘the image sought to elevate the pretensions of man instead of man praising God and his universe. Every work in sculpture is, and must be, an act of praise.’

Hepworth believed the best work had a special sense of timeless praising and affirmative creation. She said, ‘it is perhaps the difference between thinking one is a god or believing that one should reflect God.’

Writers, too, sometimes have a strong spiritual association with their location. The poet and author George Mackay Brown lived most of his life in Stromness on Orkney, and only occasionally visited the mainland, once even coming to Oxford. Born in 1921, the son of a postman, he suffered from TB and, later in life, bouts of depression. He also had a growing awareness of his need for God, and converted to 

Roman Catholicism. 

The Orkneys were not only the backdrop to his life but also the greatest influence on his writing. Seamus Heaney declared, ‘He transforms everything by passing it through the eye of the needle of Orkney.’ Again, this link with the physical world had a spiritual dimension. Brown described his collection of poems Following a Larkas written mainly in praise of the Orkney light and, he says, ‘to glorify in a small way the Light behind the light.’

So many other artists and writers (and composers) have linked their work to their location: the Stour Valley which inspired Constable; Monet’s garden at Giverny; R.S. Thomas and his deep passion for rural Wales; Thomas Hardy and Dorset. 

Is it that some writers and artists are particularly drawn to the physical world around them, or is it that some places are in themselves inspirational, and draw the artists and writers? I don’t feel I refer to my location at all when I write. Is that something to do with me, or the place where I live? Should I start searching for the location that inspires? Or take a fresh and deeper look at the world around me?

Here is an example of George Mackay Brown’s poetry, deeply simple and lingering in the mind. It is about a new house and its ceremonies, but it also has a further level as the living of 

life itself.

In the finished house a flame is brought to the hearth. 

Then a table, between door and window 

Where a stranger will eat before the men of the house. 

A bed is laid in a secret corner 

For the three agonies – love, birth, death – 

That are made beautiful with ceremony. 

The neighbours come with gifts – 

A set of cups, a calendar, some chairs. 

A fiddle is hung at the wall. 

A girl puts lucky salt in a dish. 

The cupboard will have its loaf and bottle, come winter. 

On the seventh morning 

One spills water of blessing over the threshold.