Barbara Hepworth carved Mother & Child from pink ancaster stone in 1934. At this time she shared Henry Moore’s preoccupations with such sculptural ideas as the concept of ‘truth to materials’. The sculpture has two separate elements, the mother and the child but they are carved out of the same piece of stone. The forms are linked together by the grain of the stone and the way they almost embrace each other. This sculpture is less descriptive of the visual world but we can still identify aspects of the human figure within it, there are even two drilled eyeholes in the mother’s form. However there is a movement away from carving obvious bodily details as seen in the earlier sculptures in favour of producing a simplified, almost abstract form.
The theme of "Mother & Child" had a particular relevance to Hepworth at this time, as she was expecting triplets.
