Merryn reveals Barbara Hepworth's preference for what is known as "direct carving." In art school, English sculptors were trained to model clay or plaster versions of their pieces and then turn them over to professional stonecarvers for completion. For Hepworth, however, an intimate, tactile relationship with her material was an essential part of the creative process. She avoided power tools and even polished her stone pieces herself.

Created three decades after Hepworth developed her signature style, Merryn still embodies many of these characteristic elements. Most obviously, Merryn is an organic abstraction made of simple, rounded shapes that nevertheless have a great sensual and emotional appeal. Like many of Hepworth's stone pieces, this one is pierced, creating a series of irregular, mysterious shadows that change as the viewer walks around the sculpture. Although Merryn is monochrome, it is carved from translucent alabaster, which reveals subtle internal irregularities and seems to change color, depending on the light.

Throughout her career, Hepworth stressed the influence that geography-specifically, the rugged Yorkshire countryside in which she grew up, and the Cornish coast, where she lived as an adult-had on her sculpture. So, while the vertical orientation of this work implies that it was inspired by the human body, placed on its side it could easily call to mind the curves and hollows of an English landscape. The title of this sculpture presumably refers-as do many of Hepworth's works-to an actual place, in this case, the village of St. Merryn, on the north coast of Cornwall, approximately eighty miles east of her home in St. Ives.