Locking Piece

Locking Piece (LH 515) is a sculpture by Henry Moore. It comprises two interlocking forms holding a third element between them, on a bronze base. It is usually mounted on a separate plinth. The sculpture was created in 1962–1964, and bronze casts were made in 1964–1967. The work has an organic form that defies description, with different amorphous shapes visible from different angles. It has a central hole, where the top piece rises over the bottom piece; at one end, the two larger elements are separated by a third smaller disc-like element, like a piece of cartilage. In the words of Donald Hall in his biography of Moore published in 1966, it has "two parts which fit together like a child's puzzle. It doesn't resemble one thing." Moore gave different accounts of the inspiration for the sculpture: it may reflect his observations of two pebbles that unexpectedly interlocked, or of a sawn bone fragment with a joint. The lower piece may be developed from a vertebra. He probably created small plaster models or maquettes, but none have survived and none were cast. A working model (LH 514) was created in plaster in 1962 (now held by the Art Gallery of Ontario) and then cast in bronze in 1962 in an edition of nine. It measures 104 by 88 by 85 centimetres (41 in × 35 in × 33 in). There are examples of the bronze casting at the Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens in Purchase, New York, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York, the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest and at the Henry Moore Foundation in Perry Green, Hertfordshire. A full-size plaster version was built up in layers over an armature, with Moore making minor alterations to the initial version copied by his assistants from the working model, and Moore then worked on its surface with a variety of tools. The plaster model was finished in January 1964, and then sent to the Hermann Noack foundry in Berlin to be used to make the sand mould for a…