Peter Murray comments, 'Barbara Hepworth loved to carve; the process was critical to her development as an artist. She did not like modelling or methods of working which prevented direct contact with materials. As a result she came to bronze casting rather late in her career, the first appearing in 1956. (...) Hepworth approached bronze as a carver, constructing large plaster forms which she carved before casting. This enabled her to maintain the kinaesthetic aspect of carving that was essential to the fluidity of her forms. Leaving her mark on the finished work was vitally important to her: 'Even at the very last minute, when it's finished I take a hatchet to it.' She continued to use bronze alongside wood and stone, until the end of her life.(...) Bronze enabled Barbara Hepworth to fulfil her dreams of creating sculptures for the landscape. 'All my sculpture comes out of the landscape - the feel of the years as one walks over it, the resistance, the weathering, the outcrops, the growth, structures (...) no sculpture really lives until it goes back into landscape.' The Cornish landscape stirred childhood memories of Yorkshire, providing strong images of form, shape, and texture. 'The hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form (...) the sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape.'' (see C. Stephens (ed.), Barbara Hepworth Centenary, exhibition catalogue, St Ives, Tate Gallery, 2003, p. 135).