Nwando Ebizie’s Barbara Hepworth Playlist: Circular Paths – A Hepworth Journey
Listen to a curated Barbara Hepworth-inspired playlist by multidisciplinary artist Nwando Ebizie. You’ll find 18 songs by musicians and composers including Handel, Pharoah Sanders, Björk, Carpenters and Caterina Barbieri.
Ebizie began the selection process by choosing songs Hepworth might have been working to when creating sculptures such as ‘Curved Forms (Pavan)’ and ‘Forms in Movement (Galliard)’ – for example Michael Tippett’s ‘Dance, Clarion Air’ and Benjamin Britten’s ‘Concord’.
Other tracks Ebizie listened to on walks following Hepworth’s footsteps through the Yorkshire moors and along Cornwall’s coastline in the process of creating sound work ‘The Garden of Circular Paths’, co-commissioned by Hepworth Wakefield and Yorkshire Sculpture International. The songs connect to the sense of openness of the moors and the feeling of sea against rocks.
Olivia Louvel’s ‘I Draw What I Feel in My Body’ is included to highlight Hepworth’s creative process and Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Gloria in Excelsis’ as a link to the evening meditation Ebizie attended in a St Ives church, which Hepworth regularly went to, and the sculpture ‘Ascending Form (Gloria)’.
About Nwando Ebizie
Multidisciplinary artist Nwando Ebizie creates Afrofuturist speculative fictions and alternate realities at the intersection of live art, experimental music and multi-sensory installations. She proposes new myths, rituals and provocations for radical change and radical transformation of the self and community, drawing from science fiction, Black Atlantic ritual cultures, biophilia, neuroscience, electronic music, and her own neurodiversity and Nigerian heritage.
Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life is at Towner Eastbourne from 27 May to 3 September 2023.
Olivia Louvel's work The Sculptor Speaks can be seen until 25 June 2023.