The chipping and the craft

Four-Square (Walk Through)I've been at Agile Cambridge today, at Churchill College in Cambridge. There's a Barbara Hepworth sculpture on the lawn. Four-Square (Walk Through), a piece from later in Hepworth's career and life, 1966. Big flat squares of bronze stacked into two cubes, each face with a circle cut out. You're meant to walk through it.The sculpture started small. Hepworth worked it up from smaller versions to a full-size plaster model on an aluminium armature, and the pieces were cast separately at a foundry and welded together. Earlier in her career she worked the other way: no model, straight into the stone, every cut a decision she couldn't take back.Two ways of working.Model first in clay or plaster, where ideas are cheap and mistakes can be undone. Or carve directly, responding to the material as you go.Both are craft. The right one depends on the circumstances.Michelangelo apparently said the statue is already in the block, and the sculptor just removes what isn't the…