Dame Elisabeth Frink was nine years old when the Second World War was declared. Her father, a cavalry officer in the British Army, served overseas for much of the conflict, while Frink grew up in Suffolk near several Bomber Command air bases.
This proximity to war left a lasting impression. As she later recalled:
“There was a whole bunch of very jolly Polish airmen. They’d go off in their flying machines – and sometimes they got killed. We were right next door to an operational aerodrome and sometimes we’d see the planes coming home on fire.”
(Edward Lucie-Smith and Elisabeth Frink, Frink: A Portrait, Bloomsbury, London, 1994, p.15).
The impact of these early experiences can be traced through much of Frink’s sculpture of the 1950s and 1960s. Her works from this period often explore themes of men in flight, men in space, and the physical and psychological consequences of falling. Through figures such as the “Fallen Man” and the “Bird Men,” she examined the human condition in the shadow of war, a meditation on heroism, vulnerability, and mortality.
Reflecting on this body of work later in her career, Frink remarked:
“These sculptures were the nearest I got at that time to subjective ideas of the concept of a man involved in some kind of activity other than just being. So my earlier figures were not at all sensuous; they were too much involved with fractured wings or the debris of war and heroics. By this last phrase I mean individual courage.”
(A. Ratuszniak, ed., op. cit., p.72).
As critic Edward Mullins observed, Frink’s fascination with the image of falling derived both from her own recurring dreams and from a real-life source: photographs of the French “bird-man” Valentin, who perished during one of his experimental jumps.
“This is the principal visual source of the various Bird-Men,” Mullins noted, “but the impulse came from her own sense of falling — a sensation that remained powerful in her imagination.”
(Edward Mullins, Introduction, The Art of Elisabeth Frink, Lund Humphries, London, 1972).
Frink’s work resists definitive interpretation. Rather than offering clear narratives, her sculptures invite a dialogue between object and observer.
Illustrated: Dame EliSabeth Frink and John McKenna. Image by Johnsculp, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
