Collaborative doctoral candidate University of Huddersfield/The Hepworth Wakefield, full-time, commenced January 2016
Supervisors: Dr Alison Rowley, Reader in Critical Theory, University of Huddersfield, and Eleanor Clayton, Curator, The Hepworth Wakefield
Funded by: University of Huddersfield Scholarship Research Centre: Centre for Sculptural Thinking
Thesis: Sculpture and the Written Word: Reading and Writing Barbara Hepworth
My thesis offers a revisionist account of the work and practice of the modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth through a focus on the activities of reading and writing. Central to this has been the opportunity to undertake new primary research and provide the first ever museum presentation of the personal library of Hepworth held at The Hepworth Wakefield, an archive collection never previously subject to critical scholarship. Approaching the library through Carolyn Christev Bakargiev’s conceptualisation of artistic research, I question how annotated texts, notebooks and scrapbooks may be regarded in the light of a ‘prologue mind’, and the value of such acts of sculptural thinking to our understanding of Hepworth.
Drawing on the critical approaches of art historians such as Sarah Victoria Turner, the thesis purposes to depart from the monographic approach associated with many previous critical histories, instead adhering to the model of ‘compelling and complex webs and ties’ that Turner has proposed. I present the Hepworth Library as the manifestation of such ‘webs’, focusing on the significance of instances of shared reading and exchange, in particular with other female writers and intellectuals. Using the writings of Walter Benjamin, the act of library making is also examined more widely within the little researched subject of artists’ libraries, asking how such collections may be activated in the present through curatorial and archival intervention.
Other Academic Activities
- Paul Mellon Centre Doctoral Researchers Network member, July 2017-present
- Sculptural ProcessesResearch Group member, Courtauld Institute of Art, June 2017-present
- Collaborative Doctoral Students Research Group, Department of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Huddersfield, May 2017 - present
- PhD Research Fellow, The Hepworth Wakefield, January2016-present
Curatorial and Public Programmes work
- Curation of Barbara Hepworth Library display as part of the exhibition Masterpieces of Moore and Hepworth, The Hepworth Wakefield, May 2017
- Development of Barbara Hepworth Library public programme, funded by University of Huddersfield Research Environmental Development Fund, May-October 2017
- Public programme talk delivered for Behind the Scenes: An Insider’s Guide to The Hepworth Wakefield series, February 2017
Conference Papers
- ‘Theorising and Curating the Barbara Hepworth Library: A Case Study in Artists’ Libraries’. Paper presented at Association of Art Historians Annual Conference 2017, Loughborough University, April 2017
- ‘The Artist’s Living Space and its Re-display: The Case of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore’. Paper presented at University of Huddersfield Postgraduate Research Conference, November 2016
- ‘A prayer at moments of great unhappiness’: Religion and Spirituality in Barbara Hepworth’s Post-War Practice’. Paper presented at Modern Gods: Religion and British Modernism, 1890-1960 conference, The Hepworth Wakefield, September 2016
- ‘Charting a Sculptor’s Painting: The Case of Barbara Hepworth in the 1950s and 1960s’.Conference poster presented at Generation Painting conference, Heong Gallery, Cambridge, March 2016
- ‘Barbara Hepworth and Priaulx Rainier: A Musical Conversation’. Conference poster presented at Material Histories: Networks of Women and Art in Cornwall conference, Tate St Ives, June 2015
Contact details
Clare.nadal@hud.ac.uk
Personal Links
https://hud.academia.edu/ClareNadal
https://twitter.com/Clare_Nadal