A recent journey down a particularly long online rabbit hole – the kind of digression at which the internet still sometime excels – led me to a documentary interview, recorded in 1981, between the then UK Conservative Arts Minister Norman St John-Stevas and the sculptor (soon to be Dame) Elisabeth Frink.
The full discussion, all 30 minutes of it, is on YouTube and is well worth a watch, particularly for Frink’s thoughts on her religious commissions for various churches and cathedrals. St John-Stevas was a prominent Catholic on the grandest, campest scale: he kept relics of Blessed Pius IX alongside his signed photographs of Princess Margaret and dressed up in a papal cassock when hosting house parties. Frink on the other hand, brought up in a Catholic family, found faith a thornier issue altogether: “I have very strong views on Catholicism now, on what maybe it does or it doesn’t do with relation to human beings,” she reflects in the interview (to discreet winces from her interviewer).
This concern with humanity – physically, as well as socially – is the strand that binds together all of Frink’s work. Marking 30 years since her death, there is now a new exhibition, Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within, at the Dorset Museum in Dorchester, near where she lived for the last 20 years of her life. It covers a wide range of her art, including some beautiful drawings and prints, as well as the bronze sculptures for which she is best known.
For those people with only a passing acquaintance with Elisabeth Frink and her work, there is perhaps a tendency to see her sculptures as almost brutally unsentimental, part of a post-war generation of artists more shaped by violence and strength than by beauty. Her early series of threatening, monumental male heads (“thuggish”, as one contemporary reviewer found them) are discomforting images of aggression.
And yet the real revelation of this exhibition is to see Frink placed in the context of her supremely tranquil later life at Woolland, the idyllic country home where she lived and worked, inspired by the Dorset landscape. Part of her studio has been recreated, down to the same classical music she listened to as she began each day at dawn. Archival material from her life, including photos, diaries and letters, has been assembled to give a flavour of her semi-bohemian life among her many friends – and an even larger number of animals.
The effect is to see her in a different light: less brutal and more bucolic, shaped by the rhythms of the changing seasons. She clearly felt a strong connection with the landscape around her, and the animal world was a constant source of inspiration. Her vast horse sculptures are well-known, but many of the smaller works on display show her ability to capture succinctly the physicality of animals. Frink never embraced abstraction, but objects like the print Blue Horse Head or the scraggly, elongated bronze Cock are more interested in the question of what force makes a horse or a cockerel totally unique than depicting that animal realistically. One wonders if, among the other pages of Frink’s notebook on display, full of her favourite poetry copied out by hand, appeared Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Catholic poet-priest who wrote about the individuality of every part of creation:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
This preoccupation carries over into the larger, figurative sculptures: the exhibition includes a number of her more recognisable works, including a plaster maquette copy of her famous Madonna, a rare venture in the female form. Deliberately spurning traditional Christian iconography, Frink wanted “to do away with the bambino” as she put it, and instead create a real, human figure with which viewers could identify: a gaunt, older woman; resolute yet vulnerable; a mother who has lost her son. Its more famous version stands mid-stride in the grounds of Salisbury Cathedral, notably walking away from the cathedral, her back to the trappings of power and established religion.
And then there are her final works, completed as she was dying of cancer and preoccupied by issues of mortality. Risen Christ, her final commission, stands high above the vast west doors of Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral; unveiled on Easter Sunday 1993, only a few days before her death, its grand setting rather dwarfs the sculpture. Here, though, the exhibition includes a smaller plaster maquette model to examine. Christ’s body still exudes power and strength, but up close the abiding impression is one of gentleness: a hopeful, rather than triumphant image of rebirth.
Unorthodox to the end, her conception of the resurrection is a distinctly pagan one; in her final year she also completed a series of screenprints exploring the myth of the Green Man, that ancient symbol of renewal. These were new to me, and Green Man (Blue), part of that series, stood out in the exhibition: seeing it alongside her Risen Christ one sees the similarities, the same juxtaposition of power and vulnerability, the same preoccupation with death – and life through death.
Although it will be for the bronze sculptures of horses and male figures that Frink will continue to be known, even this relatively small exhibition leaves one in little doubt as to the sheer range of her output, constantly experimenting throughout her later life and finding inspiration from new sources. If at times it felt like there was an excess of different curatorial themes to fit into a limited space (there are eight in total), then this is only because there is now so much new material about Frink’s life and work to share. Before his death in 2017 Frink’s son, the artist Lin Jammet, bequeathed the entire Frink Estate and Archive to the nation: Dorset Museum alone received some 400 artworks from the collection.
This raises the enticing prospect of further exhibitions in the future, so Frink can continue to be revealed for the creative force that she was, rather than pigeonholed. In the meantime, Elisabeth Frink: A View Within is well worth the time: it will continue its progress across the UK, first at Swindon later this year, then at Salisbury in 2025. If you can catch it at Dorchester before it closes, you can visit at the same time her Martyrs Memorial, just down the road. Unveiled in 1986 on the former site of the town gallows where a number of Catholic recusants were executed in the 16th and 17th centuries, it is a strangely intimate, almost tranquil scene – a monument both to mortality and the timeless power of the human spirit.
Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within is at the Dorset Museum, Dorchester, until April 21
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