Barbara Hepworth created some of the best-loved public sculpture in Britain and beyond. But after almost a decade of commitment to modeling and casting for large-scale public installations, she began to devote attention to her first love: a direct engagement with the material at hand and the physicality of chiseling, carving and shaping that more appropriately served her credo of ‘truth to materials.’  By 1966, when she carved the intimate Five Forms and Three Circles in white marble, she had begun to play with more rectilinear geometries, inviting circular shapes to be integrated with angular ones. The period is often viewed as Hepworth’s return to her earlier years when in a moment of sheer brilliance, she pierced a hole in a small carving sensing it would give the figure a sense of flow and to lead the viewer’s eye around it. “When I first pierced a shape,” she recalled later, “I thought it was a miracle. A new vision was opened.” The year was 1931 and it was as much a revelation for the artist as a revolution for modern sculpture.