Sculptor Barbara Hepworth trained at Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art, becoming a leading figure in the 'new movement' associated with direct carving. She settled in St Ives in 1939 and exhibited with the WIAC for almost a decade. This work was made at Trewyn Studio overlooking St Ives harbour; the celestial shapes and delicate criss-crossing strings across the surface suggest a direct connection with Hepworth’s surroundings, the pull of lunar gravity and the movements of the tide. Hepworth had begun to use string in her sculptures in the late 1930s and later indicated to Herbert Read that ‘[t]he strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills’.