It was influenced by Tachism, a French style of abstract art, and it may have been inspired by a work titled 1953, August 11 (meridian) painted a few years before by Hepworth's former second husband, the artist Ben Nicholson.
In 1958, Lilian Somerville of the British Council was organising an exhibition at the São Paulo Art Biennial in late 1959 (where Hepworth would win the Grand Prix).
Somerville suggested Hepworth to the architect Harold Mortimer from Trehearne & Norman Preston & Partners responsible for State House; he had been considering other sculptors, including Lynn Chadwick.
Finally, from 1958, she constructed a full-size armature in wood at Lanham's Sale Rooms near her Trewyn Studio in St Ives, Cornwall, which was covered with plaster by early 1959.
A unique example was cast in bronze in several pieces and then assembled at the Susse Frères foundry in Paris later in 1959, and erected in London in 1960, standing in front of a curved guarding wall of Cornish granite beside the main entrance to State House.