The naturalness of life... the sense of community is, I think, a very important factor in an artist's life. - Barbara Hepworth

A chance remark by Ardini, an Italian master carver whom I met there [in Rome], that 'marble changes colour under different people's hands' made me decide immediately that it was not dominance which one had to attain over material, but an understanding, almost a kind of persuasion, and above all greater co-ordination between head and hand. This thought has recurred again and again ever since - and has developed my greatest interests; the reason why people both move differently and stand differently in direct response to changed surroundings; the unconscious grouping of people when they are working together, producing a spatial movement which approximates to the structure of spirals in shells or rhythms in crystal structure; the meaning of the spaces between forms, or the shape of the displacement of forms in space, which in themselves have a most precise significance. All these responses spring from a factual and tactile approach to the object.

Whenever I am embraced by land and seascape I draw ideas for new sculptures; new forms to touch and walk around, new people to embrace, with an exactitude of form that those without sight can hold and realize.. ..It is essentially practical and passionate.

It's [the art-magazine 'Circle'] been reprinted and it's now referred to as classic. Well it is. But w:Ben Nicholson, Sir Leslie Martin, Gabo and Leslie Martin's wife, Sadie Speaight, and I did that. We were sitting round the fire and we said, 'Why shouldn't we do a book?'. And so we started and now it's a classic and referred to as such.