"The practical problems were formidable. But Hepworth had never rejected the maternal. On the contrary, the theme of maternity is central to the sculpture of this period. She was fascinated by natural gestation forms: the nut in the shell, the child in the womb. Intellectually, she found virtues in a balance of creative work and domesticity: "A woman artist," she argued, "is not deprived by cooking and having children, nor by nursing children with measles (even in triplicate) - one is in fact nourished by this rich life, provided one always does some work each day; even a single half hour, so that the images grow in one's mind." She came to see that the female physical experiences extended the range of the artistic perceptions. When she watched a woman carrying a child in her arms, she would feel the experience as if it were her own.
Certainly, Hepworth was able to draw on the resources of her time and place. The triplets were farmed out to a Hampstead nursery-training college; they were later given scholarships at the progressive boarding school, Dartington Hall. But what remains admirable is the tenacity with which she developed her own work, expunging naturalism, evolving the series of strictly abstract white marble circles, segments, slabs that became a symbol of 1930s Hampstead. For many leftwing artists, abstraction had become an article of faith, a bastion of freedom in the face of European fascist censorship. "
well, it was a different time i suppose. at surprise triplets!