A View from Within: Elisabeth Frink at Dorset Museum
Dorset Museum brings together over 80 sculptures, drawings and prints to showcase the life and work of the sculptor...
By
Susan Gray
December 6, 2023
The pervasiveness of post-war sculptor Elisabeth Frink’s (1930-1993) work does not always aid appreciation and understanding. Familiar figures in the Royal Festival Hall, Salisbury Cathedral and Dorchester’s Gallows Hill, with the artist’s characteristic well-worked surfaces, make it tempting to pigeonhole Frink as an artist devoted mainly to representing animals and spirituality. Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within presents a reappraisal of the artist’s career by focusing on the last 20 years of her life spent at Woolland Studio, near Blandford Forum. In the exhibition, visitors plot their own course through the sculptor’s work, within the broad themes of her sociability with neighbours, such as War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, and friends including designer Jean Muir, the importance of her third husband Alex Csaky and the role of Woolland Studio’s landscape setting in her art.
A View from Within recreates an enviably bohemian existence, with an illustrated diary of the visit of Lis and Alex (as they were known to friends) to Muir’s Northumberland home Lorbottle Hall, noting BOLLINGER, in capitals, accompanied ‘herby sausages’. An album Csaky created for his wife, with photos of her at home, at work and on holiday, facing pages of handwritten extracts of the Earl of Rochester’s poetry and Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’, is a neighbouring object. An image of Frink modelling a red, draping Issey Miyake garment marks the designer’s 1985 campaign, in which he commissioned portraits by Lord Snowdon of creative women and men including Frink, Lucie Rie and Marina Warner.
A corner of the gallery is devoted to an evocation of Frink’s studio, complete with mallets, chisels and a Stanley knife, together with tiny maquettes of cows and Walking Man, the models for larger group works. Schubert’s Adagio played during my visit, evoking the classical playlist Frink kept scrawled above her studio sink - Grieg’s Last Spring, the track she chose for Desert Island Discs, will also be part of the soundtrack. Frink’s plaster-covered radio, tuned to a classical station, was turned on at 6.30am every morning when she started work.
Part-hidden in the sunken lanes of Blackmore Vale, with downs to the back, Woolland Studio’s grounds gave Frink the external space to test out the positioning of work for the first time. Larger artworks were moved and repositioned by tractor, and a graphite drawing for Flying Men (1982) gives an impression of the two helmeted, science fiction style figures, roped to invisible wings, that stood above Frink’s driveway for a few years. Commissioned for Brixton Estates in Dunstable, the work was inspired by the hang gliders who flew over Woolland, but also refences the myth of Icarus, and humanity’s propensity for destructive overconfidence.
Seated Man II (1986), on loan from Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was placed in various settings, gazing over paddocks, on the grass terrace, and beside the swimming pool as a focus for summer parties. The bronze giant with a green-tinged face, looking to the side and lost in thought, sits on the same makeshift seat Frink created while working on the plaster cast. Nude (1982), a sepia and black lithograph, studies the seated male nude from behind, with horizontal black hatching lending the muscular strength sensed in Seated Man II. Frink made her first seated male figure in 1954 to express man’s solitude and capacity for thought and reflection. For Frink, sculpting and drawing were related practices: ‘I think drawings and sculptures are really closely connected, and most of my drawings are ideas for sculptures.’
Frink’s contemplations of the darker aspects of human nature are captured in Goggle Head (1969) and Riace III (1988). The former is a large, slightly pockmarked, elongated head, portraying no expression as his eyes are hidden behind opaque bronze sunglasses. Her fascination with what was going on behind the sunglasses of the powerful was inspired by seeing a photograph of Moroccan military leader General Mohamed Oufkir during her time living in France. The inspiration for Riace III also predated her Woolland years, as the life-size standing figure is based on two Ancient Greek warriors recovered in 1971 from the sea near Riace in Calabria. Seeing the statues on a trip to Italy, the artist was fascinated by the inner conflict between hero warrior and mercenary thug. The menacing posture of the Riace, arms pulling away from the torso, fists clenched, expresses this contradiction, which is heightened by their ghostly, white-painted faces. They are a gang brutalised by aggression, yet rendered in bronze, the high-status art material linked to civilisation’s highest values.
Life’s fragility is a recurring theme in Frink’s work; in 1990, she was diagnosed with cancer and, faced with her own mortality, drew enormous inspiration and enjoyment from creating sculpture. Her hope for recovery fed a vision of regeneration, expressed in much of her final work. Walking Madonna (1981) - the statue walking away from the doors of Salisbury Cathedral - prefigures Frink’s final phase, with its ordinary, careworn woman walking back into life on elongated limbs beneath a simple robe, as best she can. Risen Christ (1992) for Liverpool Cathedral was Frink’s last commission and the only one for which she had studio assistance. She chose the subject of the resurrection because, although dying of cancer, she believed something of the spirit lived on; it was important to her sculpturally and emotionally. She died a few days after its completion. ‘For me the resurrected Christ definitely has personal meaning, similar to that of the Green Man heads. They all symbolise rebirth.’ The light green plaster maquette of Risen Christ portrays a figure with a calm face, arms slightly outstretched, facing the future.
Animals darted between Frinks’ sculptures in her Dorset garden, and lithographs and bronzes of birds, dogs and horses appear throughout this show. They are a testament to the artist’s preoccupation with the unequal relationship between man and animals, and a link to Frink’s rural wartime childhood, when she would go out to shoot rabbits for the pot.
Faced with the acquisition of 400 artworks in 2020, following the death of Frink’s son Lin Jammet three years earlier, Dorset Museum and Gallery are coming to terms with a cornucopia of post-war British art. Breaking the spell of Frink’s ubiquity, and appraising her afresh as a key modern artist is not an overnight task. A View from Within’s biographical and contextual approach, positioning Frink in the art historical landscape through the objects she made in her Dorset studio, is a remarkable opening shot, not the last word.
Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within is showing at Dorset Museum until 21st April.
The pervasiveness of post-war sculptor Elisabeth Frink’s (1930-1993) work does not always aid appreciation and understanding. Familiar figures in the Royal Festival Hall, Salisbury Cathedral and Dorchester’s Gallows Hill, with the artist’s characteristic well-worked surfaces, make it tempting to pigeonhole Frink as an artist devoted mainly to representing animals and spirituality. Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within presents a reappraisal of the artist’s career by focusing on the last 20 years of her life spent at Woolland Studio, near Blandford Forum. In the exhibition, visitors plot their own course through the sculptor’s work, within the broad themes of her sociability with neighbours, such as War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, and friends including designer Jean Muir, the importance of her third husband Alex Csaky and the role of Woolland Studio’s landscape setting in her art.
A View from Within recreates an enviably bohemian existence, with an illustrated diary of the visit of Lis and Alex (as they were known to friends) to Muir’s Northumberland home Lorbottle Hall, noting BOLLINGER, in capitals, accompanied ‘herby sausages’. An album Csaky created for his wife, with photos of her at home, at work and on holiday, facing pages of handwritten extracts of the Earl of Rochester’s poetry and Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’, is a neighbouring object. An image of Frink modelling a red, draping Issey Miyake garment marks the designer’s 1985 campaign, in which he commissioned portraits by Lord Snowdon of creative women and men including Frink, Lucie Rie and Marina Warner.
A corner of the gallery is devoted to an evocation of Frink’s studio, complete with mallets, chisels and a Stanley knife, together with tiny maquettes of cows and Walking Man, the models for larger group works. Schubert’s Adagio played during my visit, evoking the classical playlist Frink kept scrawled above her studio sink - Grieg’s Last Spring, the track she chose for Desert Island Discs, will also be part of the soundtrack. Frink’s plaster-covered radio, tuned to a classical station, was turned on at 6.30am every morning when she started work.
Part-hidden in the sunken lanes of Blackmore Vale, with downs to the back, Woolland Studio’s grounds gave Frink the external space to test out the positioning of work for the first time. Larger artworks were moved and repositioned by tractor, and a graphite drawing for Flying Men (1982) gives an impression of the two helmeted, science fiction style figures, roped to invisible wings, that stood above Frink’s driveway for a few years. Commissioned for Brixton Estates in Dunstable, the work was inspired by the hang gliders who flew over Woolland, but also refences the myth of Icarus, and humanity’s propensity for destructive overconfidence.
Seated Man II (1986), on loan from Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was placed in various settings, gazing over paddocks, on the grass terrace, and beside the swimming pool as a focus for summer parties. The bronze giant with a green-tinged face, looking to the side and lost in thought, sits on the same makeshift seat Frink created while working on the plaster cast. Nude (1982), a sepia and black lithograph, studies the seated male nude from behind, with horizontal black hatching lending the muscular strength sensed in Seated Man II. Frink made her first seated male figure in 1954 to express man’s solitude and capacity for thought and reflection. For Frink, sculpting and drawing were related practices: ‘I think drawings and sculptures are really closely connected, and most of my drawings are ideas for sculptures.’
Frink’s contemplations of the darker aspects of human nature are captured in Goggle Head (1969) and Riace III (1988). The former is a large, slightly pockmarked, elongated head, portraying no expression as his eyes are hidden behind opaque bronze sunglasses. Her fascination with what was going on behind the sunglasses of the powerful was inspired by seeing a photograph of Moroccan military leader General Mohamed Oufkir during her time living in France. The inspiration for Riace III also predated her Woolland years, as the life-size standing figure is based on two Ancient Greek warriors recovered in 1971 from the sea near Riace in Calabria. Seeing the statues on a trip to Italy, the artist was fascinated by the inner conflict between hero warrior and mercenary thug. The menacing posture of the Riace, arms pulling away from the torso, fists clenched, expresses this contradiction, which is heightened by their ghostly, white-painted faces. They are a gang brutalised by aggression, yet rendered in bronze, the high-status art material linked to civilisation’s highest values.
Life’s fragility is a recurring theme in Frink’s work; in 1990, she was diagnosed with cancer and, faced with her own mortality, drew enormous inspiration and enjoyment from creating sculpture. Her hope for recovery fed a vision of regeneration, expressed in much of her final work. Walking Madonna (1981) - the statue walking away from the doors of Salisbury Cathedral - prefigures Frink’s final phase, with its ordinary, careworn woman walking back into life on elongated limbs beneath a simple robe, as best she can. Risen Christ (1992) for Liverpool Cathedral was Frink’s last commission and the only one for which she had studio assistance. She chose the subject of the resurrection because, although dying of cancer, she believed something of the spirit lived on; it was important to her sculpturally and emotionally. She died a few days after its completion. ‘For me the resurrected Christ definitely has personal meaning, similar to that of the Green Man heads. They all symbolise rebirth.’ The light green plaster maquette of Risen Christ portrays a figure with a calm face, arms slightly outstretched, facing the future.
Animals darted between Frinks’ sculptures in her Dorset garden, and lithographs and bronzes of birds, dogs and horses appear throughout this show. They are a testament to the artist’s preoccupation with the unequal relationship between man and animals, and a link to Frink’s rural wartime childhood, when she would go out to shoot rabbits for the pot.
Faced with the acquisition of 400 artworks in 2020, following the death of Frink’s son Lin Jammet three years earlier, Dorset Museum and Gallery are coming to terms with a cornucopia of post-war British art. Breaking the spell of Frink’s ubiquity, and appraising her afresh as a key modern artist is not an overnight task. A View from Within’s biographical and contextual approach, positioning Frink in the art historical landscape through the objects she made in her Dorset studio, is a remarkable opening shot, not the last word.
Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within is showing at Dorset Museum until 21st April.
The pervasiveness of post-war sculptor Elisabeth Frink’s (1930-1993) work does not always aid appreciation and understanding. Familiar figures in the Royal Festival Hall, Salisbury Cathedral and Dorchester’s Gallows Hill, with the artist’s characteristic well-worked surfaces, make it tempting to pigeonhole Frink as an artist devoted mainly to representing animals and spirituality. Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within presents a reappraisal of the artist’s career by focusing on the last 20 years of her life spent at Woolland Studio, near Blandford Forum. In the exhibition, visitors plot their own course through the sculptor’s work, within the broad themes of her sociability with neighbours, such as War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, and friends including designer Jean Muir, the importance of her third husband Alex Csaky and the role of Woolland Studio’s landscape setting in her art.
A View from Within recreates an enviably bohemian existence, with an illustrated diary of the visit of Lis and Alex (as they were known to friends) to Muir’s Northumberland home Lorbottle Hall, noting BOLLINGER, in capitals, accompanied ‘herby sausages’. An album Csaky created for his wife, with photos of her at home, at work and on holiday, facing pages of handwritten extracts of the Earl of Rochester’s poetry and Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’, is a neighbouring object. An image of Frink modelling a red, draping Issey Miyake garment marks the designer’s 1985 campaign, in which he commissioned portraits by Lord Snowdon of creative women and men including Frink, Lucie Rie and Marina Warner.
A corner of the gallery is devoted to an evocation of Frink’s studio, complete with mallets, chisels and a Stanley knife, together with tiny maquettes of cows and Walking Man, the models for larger group works. Schubert’s Adagio played during my visit, evoking the classical playlist Frink kept scrawled above her studio sink - Grieg’s Last Spring, the track she chose for Desert Island Discs, will also be part of the soundtrack. Frink’s plaster-covered radio, tuned to a classical station, was turned on at 6.30am every morning when she started work.
Part-hidden in the sunken lanes of Blackmore Vale, with downs to the back, Woolland Studio’s grounds gave Frink the external space to test out the positioning of work for the first time. Larger artworks were moved and repositioned by tractor, and a graphite drawing for Flying Men (1982) gives an impression of the two helmeted, science fiction style figures, roped to invisible wings, that stood above Frink’s driveway for a few years. Commissioned for Brixton Estates in Dunstable, the work was inspired by the hang gliders who flew over Woolland, but also refences the myth of Icarus, and humanity’s propensity for destructive overconfidence.
Seated Man II (1986), on loan from Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was placed in various settings, gazing over paddocks, on the grass terrace, and beside the swimming pool as a focus for summer parties. The bronze giant with a green-tinged face, looking to the side and lost in thought, sits on the same makeshift seat Frink created while working on the plaster cast. Nude (1982), a sepia and black lithograph, studies the seated male nude from behind, with horizontal black hatching lending the muscular strength sensed in Seated Man II. Frink made her first seated male figure in 1954 to express man’s solitude and capacity for thought and reflection. For Frink, sculpting and drawing were related practices: ‘I think drawings and sculptures are really closely connected, and most of my drawings are ideas for sculptures.’
Frink’s contemplations of the darker aspects of human nature are captured in Goggle Head (1969) and Riace III (1988). The former is a large, slightly pockmarked, elongated head, portraying no expression as his eyes are hidden behind opaque bronze sunglasses. Her fascination with what was going on behind the sunglasses of the powerful was inspired by seeing a photograph of Moroccan military leader General Mohamed Oufkir during her time living in France. The inspiration for Riace III also predated her Woolland years, as the life-size standing figure is based on two Ancient Greek warriors recovered in 1971 from the sea near Riace in Calabria. Seeing the statues on a trip to Italy, the artist was fascinated by the inner conflict between hero warrior and mercenary thug. The menacing posture of the Riace, arms pulling away from the torso, fists clenched, expresses this contradiction, which is heightened by their ghostly, white-painted faces. They are a gang brutalised by aggression, yet rendered in bronze, the high-status art material linked to civilisation’s highest values.
Life’s fragility is a recurring theme in Frink’s work; in 1990, she was diagnosed with cancer and, faced with her own mortality, drew enormous inspiration and enjoyment from creating sculpture. Her hope for recovery fed a vision of regeneration, expressed in much of her final work. Walking Madonna (1981) - the statue walking away from the doors of Salisbury Cathedral - prefigures Frink’s final phase, with its ordinary, careworn woman walking back into life on elongated limbs beneath a simple robe, as best she can. Risen Christ (1992) for Liverpool Cathedral was Frink’s last commission and the only one for which she had studio assistance. She chose the subject of the resurrection because, although dying of cancer, she believed something of the spirit lived on; it was important to her sculpturally and emotionally. She died a few days after its completion. ‘For me the resurrected Christ definitely has personal meaning, similar to that of the Green Man heads. They all symbolise rebirth.’ The light green plaster maquette of Risen Christ portrays a figure with a calm face, arms slightly outstretched, facing the future.
Animals darted between Frinks’ sculptures in her Dorset garden, and lithographs and bronzes of birds, dogs and horses appear throughout this show. They are a testament to the artist’s preoccupation with the unequal relationship between man and animals, and a link to Frink’s rural wartime childhood, when she would go out to shoot rabbits for the pot.
Faced with the acquisition of 400 artworks in 2020, following the death of Frink’s son Lin Jammet three years earlier, Dorset Museum and Gallery are coming to terms with a cornucopia of post-war British art. Breaking the spell of Frink’s ubiquity, and appraising her afresh as a key modern artist is not an overnight task. A View from Within’s biographical and contextual approach, positioning Frink in the art historical landscape through the objects she made in her Dorset studio, is a remarkable opening shot, not the last word.
Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within is showing at Dorset Museum until 21st April.
The pervasiveness of post-war sculptor Elisabeth Frink’s (1930-1993) work does not always aid appreciation and understanding. Familiar figures in the Royal Festival Hall, Salisbury Cathedral and Dorchester’s Gallows Hill, with the artist’s characteristic well-worked surfaces, make it tempting to pigeonhole Frink as an artist devoted mainly to representing animals and spirituality. Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within presents a reappraisal of the artist’s career by focusing on the last 20 years of her life spent at Woolland Studio, near Blandford Forum. In the exhibition, visitors plot their own course through the sculptor’s work, within the broad themes of her sociability with neighbours, such as War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, and friends including designer Jean Muir, the importance of her third husband Alex Csaky and the role of Woolland Studio’s landscape setting in her art.
A View from Within recreates an enviably bohemian existence, with an illustrated diary of the visit of Lis and Alex (as they were known to friends) to Muir’s Northumberland home Lorbottle Hall, noting BOLLINGER, in capitals, accompanied ‘herby sausages’. An album Csaky created for his wife, with photos of her at home, at work and on holiday, facing pages of handwritten extracts of the Earl of Rochester’s poetry and Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’, is a neighbouring object. An image of Frink modelling a red, draping Issey Miyake garment marks the designer’s 1985 campaign, in which he commissioned portraits by Lord Snowdon of creative women and men including Frink, Lucie Rie and Marina Warner.
A corner of the gallery is devoted to an evocation of Frink’s studio, complete with mallets, chisels and a Stanley knife, together with tiny maquettes of cows and Walking Man, the models for larger group works. Schubert’s Adagio played during my visit, evoking the classical playlist Frink kept scrawled above her studio sink - Grieg’s Last Spring, the track she chose for Desert Island Discs, will also be part of the soundtrack. Frink’s plaster-covered radio, tuned to a classical station, was turned on at 6.30am every morning when she started work.
Part-hidden in the sunken lanes of Blackmore Vale, with downs to the back, Woolland Studio’s grounds gave Frink the external space to test out the positioning of work for the first time. Larger artworks were moved and repositioned by tractor, and a graphite drawing for Flying Men (1982) gives an impression of the two helmeted, science fiction style figures, roped to invisible wings, that stood above Frink’s driveway for a few years. Commissioned for Brixton Estates in Dunstable, the work was inspired by the hang gliders who flew over Woolland, but also refences the myth of Icarus, and humanity’s propensity for destructive overconfidence.
Seated Man II (1986), on loan from Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was placed in various settings, gazing over paddocks, on the grass terrace, and beside the swimming pool as a focus for summer parties. The bronze giant with a green-tinged face, looking to the side and lost in thought, sits on the same makeshift seat Frink created while working on the plaster cast. Nude (1982), a sepia and black lithograph, studies the seated male nude from behind, with horizontal black hatching lending the muscular strength sensed in Seated Man II. Frink made her first seated male figure in 1954 to express man’s solitude and capacity for thought and reflection. For Frink, sculpting and drawing were related practices: ‘I think drawings and sculptures are really closely connected, and most of my drawings are ideas for sculptures.’
Frink’s contemplations of the darker aspects of human nature are captured in Goggle Head (1969) and Riace III (1988). The former is a large, slightly pockmarked, elongated head, portraying no expression as his eyes are hidden behind opaque bronze sunglasses. Her fascination with what was going on behind the sunglasses of the powerful was inspired by seeing a photograph of Moroccan military leader General Mohamed Oufkir during her time living in France. The inspiration for Riace III also predated her Woolland years, as the life-size standing figure is based on two Ancient Greek warriors recovered in 1971 from the sea near Riace in Calabria. Seeing the statues on a trip to Italy, the artist was fascinated by the inner conflict between hero warrior and mercenary thug. The menacing posture of the Riace, arms pulling away from the torso, fists clenched, expresses this contradiction, which is heightened by their ghostly, white-painted faces. They are a gang brutalised by aggression, yet rendered in bronze, the high-status art material linked to civilisation’s highest values.
Life’s fragility is a recurring theme in Frink’s work; in 1990, she was diagnosed with cancer and, faced with her own mortality, drew enormous inspiration and enjoyment from creating sculpture. Her hope for recovery fed a vision of regeneration, expressed in much of her final work. Walking Madonna (1981) - the statue walking away from the doors of Salisbury Cathedral - prefigures Frink’s final phase, with its ordinary, careworn woman walking back into life on elongated limbs beneath a simple robe, as best she can. Risen Christ (1992) for Liverpool Cathedral was Frink’s last commission and the only one for which she had studio assistance. She chose the subject of the resurrection because, although dying of cancer, she believed something of the spirit lived on; it was important to her sculpturally and emotionally. She died a few days after its completion. ‘For me the resurrected Christ definitely has personal meaning, similar to that of the Green Man heads. They all symbolise rebirth.’ The light green plaster maquette of Risen Christ portrays a figure with a calm face, arms slightly outstretched, facing the future.
Animals darted between Frinks’ sculptures in her Dorset garden, and lithographs and bronzes of birds, dogs and horses appear throughout this show. They are a testament to the artist’s preoccupation with the unequal relationship between man and animals, and a link to Frink’s rural wartime childhood, when she would go out to shoot rabbits for the pot.
Faced with the acquisition of 400 artworks in 2020, following the death of Frink’s son Lin Jammet three years earlier, Dorset Museum and Gallery are coming to terms with a cornucopia of post-war British art. Breaking the spell of Frink’s ubiquity, and appraising her afresh as a key modern artist is not an overnight task. A View from Within’s biographical and contextual approach, positioning Frink in the art historical landscape through the objects she made in her Dorset studio, is a remarkable opening shot, not the last word.
Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within is showing at Dorset Museum until 21st April.
The pervasiveness of post-war sculptor Elisabeth Frink’s (1930-1993) work does not always aid appreciation and understanding. Familiar figures in the Royal Festival Hall, Salisbury Cathedral and Dorchester’s Gallows Hill, with the artist’s characteristic well-worked surfaces, make it tempting to pigeonhole Frink as an artist devoted mainly to representing animals and spirituality. Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within presents a reappraisal of the artist’s career by focusing on the last 20 years of her life spent at Woolland Studio, near Blandford Forum. In the exhibition, visitors plot their own course through the sculptor’s work, within the broad themes of her sociability with neighbours, such as War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, and friends including designer Jean Muir, the importance of her third husband Alex Csaky and the role of Woolland Studio’s landscape setting in her art.
A View from Within recreates an enviably bohemian existence, with an illustrated diary of the visit of Lis and Alex (as they were known to friends) to Muir’s Northumberland home Lorbottle Hall, noting BOLLINGER, in capitals, accompanied ‘herby sausages’. An album Csaky created for his wife, with photos of her at home, at work and on holiday, facing pages of handwritten extracts of the Earl of Rochester’s poetry and Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’, is a neighbouring object. An image of Frink modelling a red, draping Issey Miyake garment marks the designer’s 1985 campaign, in which he commissioned portraits by Lord Snowdon of creative women and men including Frink, Lucie Rie and Marina Warner.
A corner of the gallery is devoted to an evocation of Frink’s studio, complete with mallets, chisels and a Stanley knife, together with tiny maquettes of cows and Walking Man, the models for larger group works. Schubert’s Adagio played during my visit, evoking the classical playlist Frink kept scrawled above her studio sink - Grieg’s Last Spring, the track she chose for Desert Island Discs, will also be part of the soundtrack. Frink’s plaster-covered radio, tuned to a classical station, was turned on at 6.30am every morning when she started work.
Part-hidden in the sunken lanes of Blackmore Vale, with downs to the back, Woolland Studio’s grounds gave Frink the external space to test out the positioning of work for the first time. Larger artworks were moved and repositioned by tractor, and a graphite drawing for Flying Men (1982) gives an impression of the two helmeted, science fiction style figures, roped to invisible wings, that stood above Frink’s driveway for a few years. Commissioned for Brixton Estates in Dunstable, the work was inspired by the hang gliders who flew over Woolland, but also refences the myth of Icarus, and humanity’s propensity for destructive overconfidence.
Seated Man II (1986), on loan from Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was placed in various settings, gazing over paddocks, on the grass terrace, and beside the swimming pool as a focus for summer parties. The bronze giant with a green-tinged face, looking to the side and lost in thought, sits on the same makeshift seat Frink created while working on the plaster cast. Nude (1982), a sepia and black lithograph, studies the seated male nude from behind, with horizontal black hatching lending the muscular strength sensed in Seated Man II. Frink made her first seated male figure in 1954 to express man’s solitude and capacity for thought and reflection. For Frink, sculpting and drawing were related practices: ‘I think drawings and sculptures are really closely connected, and most of my drawings are ideas for sculptures.’
Frink’s contemplations of the darker aspects of human nature are captured in Goggle Head (1969) and Riace III (1988). The former is a large, slightly pockmarked, elongated head, portraying no expression as his eyes are hidden behind opaque bronze sunglasses. Her fascination with what was going on behind the sunglasses of the powerful was inspired by seeing a photograph of Moroccan military leader General Mohamed Oufkir during her time living in France. The inspiration for Riace III also predated her Woolland years, as the life-size standing figure is based on two Ancient Greek warriors recovered in 1971 from the sea near Riace in Calabria. Seeing the statues on a trip to Italy, the artist was fascinated by the inner conflict between hero warrior and mercenary thug. The menacing posture of the Riace, arms pulling away from the torso, fists clenched, expresses this contradiction, which is heightened by their ghostly, white-painted faces. They are a gang brutalised by aggression, yet rendered in bronze, the high-status art material linked to civilisation’s highest values.
Life’s fragility is a recurring theme in Frink’s work; in 1990, she was diagnosed with cancer and, faced with her own mortality, drew enormous inspiration and enjoyment from creating sculpture. Her hope for recovery fed a vision of regeneration, expressed in much of her final work. Walking Madonna (1981) - the statue walking away from the doors of Salisbury Cathedral - prefigures Frink’s final phase, with its ordinary, careworn woman walking back into life on elongated limbs beneath a simple robe, as best she can. Risen Christ (1992) for Liverpool Cathedral was Frink’s last commission and the only one for which she had studio assistance. She chose the subject of the resurrection because, although dying of cancer, she believed something of the spirit lived on; it was important to her sculpturally and emotionally. She died a few days after its completion. ‘For me the resurrected Christ definitely has personal meaning, similar to that of the Green Man heads. They all symbolise rebirth.’ The light green plaster maquette of Risen Christ portrays a figure with a calm face, arms slightly outstretched, facing the future.
Animals darted between Frinks’ sculptures in her Dorset garden, and lithographs and bronzes of birds, dogs and horses appear throughout this show. They are a testament to the artist’s preoccupation with the unequal relationship between man and animals, and a link to Frink’s rural wartime childhood, when she would go out to shoot rabbits for the pot.
Faced with the acquisition of 400 artworks in 2020, following the death of Frink’s son Lin Jammet three years earlier, Dorset Museum and Gallery are coming to terms with a cornucopia of post-war British art. Breaking the spell of Frink’s ubiquity, and appraising her afresh as a key modern artist is not an overnight task. A View from Within’s biographical and contextual approach, positioning Frink in the art historical landscape through the objects she made in her Dorset studio, is a remarkable opening shot, not the last word.
Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within is showing at Dorset Museum until 21st April.
The pervasiveness of post-war sculptor Elisabeth Frink’s (1930-1993) work does not always aid appreciation and understanding. Familiar figures in the Royal Festival Hall, Salisbury Cathedral and Dorchester’s Gallows Hill, with the artist’s characteristic well-worked surfaces, make it tempting to pigeonhole Frink as an artist devoted mainly to representing animals and spirituality. Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within presents a reappraisal of the artist’s career by focusing on the last 20 years of her life spent at Woolland Studio, near Blandford Forum. In the exhibition, visitors plot their own course through the sculptor’s work, within the broad themes of her sociability with neighbours, such as War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, and friends including designer Jean Muir, the importance of her third husband Alex Csaky and the role of Woolland Studio’s landscape setting in her art.
A View from Within recreates an enviably bohemian existence, with an illustrated diary of the visit of Lis and Alex (as they were known to friends) to Muir’s Northumberland home Lorbottle Hall, noting BOLLINGER, in capitals, accompanied ‘herby sausages’. An album Csaky created for his wife, with photos of her at home, at work and on holiday, facing pages of handwritten extracts of the Earl of Rochester’s poetry and Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’, is a neighbouring object. An image of Frink modelling a red, draping Issey Miyake garment marks the designer’s 1985 campaign, in which he commissioned portraits by Lord Snowdon of creative women and men including Frink, Lucie Rie and Marina Warner.
A corner of the gallery is devoted to an evocation of Frink’s studio, complete with mallets, chisels and a Stanley knife, together with tiny maquettes of cows and Walking Man, the models for larger group works. Schubert’s Adagio played during my visit, evoking the classical playlist Frink kept scrawled above her studio sink - Grieg’s Last Spring, the track she chose for Desert Island Discs, will also be part of the soundtrack. Frink’s plaster-covered radio, tuned to a classical station, was turned on at 6.30am every morning when she started work.
Part-hidden in the sunken lanes of Blackmore Vale, with downs to the back, Woolland Studio’s grounds gave Frink the external space to test out the positioning of work for the first time. Larger artworks were moved and repositioned by tractor, and a graphite drawing for Flying Men (1982) gives an impression of the two helmeted, science fiction style figures, roped to invisible wings, that stood above Frink’s driveway for a few years. Commissioned for Brixton Estates in Dunstable, the work was inspired by the hang gliders who flew over Woolland, but also refences the myth of Icarus, and humanity’s propensity for destructive overconfidence.
Seated Man II (1986), on loan from Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was placed in various settings, gazing over paddocks, on the grass terrace, and beside the swimming pool as a focus for summer parties. The bronze giant with a green-tinged face, looking to the side and lost in thought, sits on the same makeshift seat Frink created while working on the plaster cast. Nude (1982), a sepia and black lithograph, studies the seated male nude from behind, with horizontal black hatching lending the muscular strength sensed in Seated Man II. Frink made her first seated male figure in 1954 to express man’s solitude and capacity for thought and reflection. For Frink, sculpting and drawing were related practices: ‘I think drawings and sculptures are really closely connected, and most of my drawings are ideas for sculptures.’
Frink’s contemplations of the darker aspects of human nature are captured in Goggle Head (1969) and Riace III (1988). The former is a large, slightly pockmarked, elongated head, portraying no expression as his eyes are hidden behind opaque bronze sunglasses. Her fascination with what was going on behind the sunglasses of the powerful was inspired by seeing a photograph of Moroccan military leader General Mohamed Oufkir during her time living in France. The inspiration for Riace III also predated her Woolland years, as the life-size standing figure is based on two Ancient Greek warriors recovered in 1971 from the sea near Riace in Calabria. Seeing the statues on a trip to Italy, the artist was fascinated by the inner conflict between hero warrior and mercenary thug. The menacing posture of the Riace, arms pulling away from the torso, fists clenched, expresses this contradiction, which is heightened by their ghostly, white-painted faces. They are a gang brutalised by aggression, yet rendered in bronze, the high-status art material linked to civilisation’s highest values.
Life’s fragility is a recurring theme in Frink’s work; in 1990, she was diagnosed with cancer and, faced with her own mortality, drew enormous inspiration and enjoyment from creating sculpture. Her hope for recovery fed a vision of regeneration, expressed in much of her final work. Walking Madonna (1981) - the statue walking away from the doors of Salisbury Cathedral - prefigures Frink’s final phase, with its ordinary, careworn woman walking back into life on elongated limbs beneath a simple robe, as best she can. Risen Christ (1992) for Liverpool Cathedral was Frink’s last commission and the only one for which she had studio assistance. She chose the subject of the resurrection because, although dying of cancer, she believed something of the spirit lived on; it was important to her sculpturally and emotionally. She died a few days after its completion. ‘For me the resurrected Christ definitely has personal meaning, similar to that of the Green Man heads. They all symbolise rebirth.’ The light green plaster maquette of Risen Christ portrays a figure with a calm face, arms slightly outstretched, facing the future.
Animals darted between Frinks’ sculptures in her Dorset garden, and lithographs and bronzes of birds, dogs and horses appear throughout this show. They are a testament to the artist’s preoccupation with the unequal relationship between man and animals, and a link to Frink’s rural wartime childhood, when she would go out to shoot rabbits for the pot.
Faced with the acquisition of 400 artworks in 2020, following the death of Frink’s son Lin Jammet three years earlier, Dorset Museum and Gallery are coming to terms with a cornucopia of post-war British art. Breaking the spell of Frink’s ubiquity, and appraising her afresh as a key modern artist is not an overnight task. A View from Within’s biographical and contextual approach, positioning Frink in the art historical landscape through the objects she made in her Dorset studio, is a remarkable opening shot, not the last word.
Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within is showing at Dorset Museum until 21st April.
The pervasiveness of post-war sculptor Elisabeth Frink’s (1930-1993) work does not always aid appreciation and understanding. Familiar figures in the Royal Festival Hall, Salisbury Cathedral and Dorchester’s Gallows Hill, with the artist’s characteristic well-worked surfaces, make it tempting to pigeonhole Frink as an artist devoted mainly to representing animals and spirituality. Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within presents a reappraisal of the artist’s career by focusing on the last 20 years of her life spent at Woolland Studio, near Blandford Forum. In the exhibition, visitors plot their own course through the sculptor’s work, within the broad themes of her sociability with neighbours, such as War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, and friends including designer Jean Muir, the importance of her third husband Alex Csaky and the role of Woolland Studio’s landscape setting in her art.
A View from Within recreates an enviably bohemian existence, with an illustrated diary of the visit of Lis and Alex (as they were known to friends) to Muir’s Northumberland home Lorbottle Hall, noting BOLLINGER, in capitals, accompanied ‘herby sausages’. An album Csaky created for his wife, with photos of her at home, at work and on holiday, facing pages of handwritten extracts of the Earl of Rochester’s poetry and Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’, is a neighbouring object. An image of Frink modelling a red, draping Issey Miyake garment marks the designer’s 1985 campaign, in which he commissioned portraits by Lord Snowdon of creative women and men including Frink, Lucie Rie and Marina Warner.
A corner of the gallery is devoted to an evocation of Frink’s studio, complete with mallets, chisels and a Stanley knife, together with tiny maquettes of cows and Walking Man, the models for larger group works. Schubert’s Adagio played during my visit, evoking the classical playlist Frink kept scrawled above her studio sink - Grieg’s Last Spring, the track she chose for Desert Island Discs, will also be part of the soundtrack. Frink’s plaster-covered radio, tuned to a classical station, was turned on at 6.30am every morning when she started work.
Part-hidden in the sunken lanes of Blackmore Vale, with downs to the back, Woolland Studio’s grounds gave Frink the external space to test out the positioning of work for the first time. Larger artworks were moved and repositioned by tractor, and a graphite drawing for Flying Men (1982) gives an impression of the two helmeted, science fiction style figures, roped to invisible wings, that stood above Frink’s driveway for a few years. Commissioned for Brixton Estates in Dunstable, the work was inspired by the hang gliders who flew over Woolland, but also refences the myth of Icarus, and humanity’s propensity for destructive overconfidence.
Seated Man II (1986), on loan from Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was placed in various settings, gazing over paddocks, on the grass terrace, and beside the swimming pool as a focus for summer parties. The bronze giant with a green-tinged face, looking to the side and lost in thought, sits on the same makeshift seat Frink created while working on the plaster cast. Nude (1982), a sepia and black lithograph, studies the seated male nude from behind, with horizontal black hatching lending the muscular strength sensed in Seated Man II. Frink made her first seated male figure in 1954 to express man’s solitude and capacity for thought and reflection. For Frink, sculpting and drawing were related practices: ‘I think drawings and sculptures are really closely connected, and most of my drawings are ideas for sculptures.’
Frink’s contemplations of the darker aspects of human nature are captured in Goggle Head (1969) and Riace III (1988). The former is a large, slightly pockmarked, elongated head, portraying no expression as his eyes are hidden behind opaque bronze sunglasses. Her fascination with what was going on behind the sunglasses of the powerful was inspired by seeing a photograph of Moroccan military leader General Mohamed Oufkir during her time living in France. The inspiration for Riace III also predated her Woolland years, as the life-size standing figure is based on two Ancient Greek warriors recovered in 1971 from the sea near Riace in Calabria. Seeing the statues on a trip to Italy, the artist was fascinated by the inner conflict between hero warrior and mercenary thug. The menacing posture of the Riace, arms pulling away from the torso, fists clenched, expresses this contradiction, which is heightened by their ghostly, white-painted faces. They are a gang brutalised by aggression, yet rendered in bronze, the high-status art material linked to civilisation’s highest values.
Life’s fragility is a recurring theme in Frink’s work; in 1990, she was diagnosed with cancer and, faced with her own mortality, drew enormous inspiration and enjoyment from creating sculpture. Her hope for recovery fed a vision of regeneration, expressed in much of her final work. Walking Madonna (1981) - the statue walking away from the doors of Salisbury Cathedral - prefigures Frink’s final phase, with its ordinary, careworn woman walking back into life on elongated limbs beneath a simple robe, as best she can. Risen Christ (1992) for Liverpool Cathedral was Frink’s last commission and the only one for which she had studio assistance. She chose the subject of the resurrection because, although dying of cancer, she believed something of the spirit lived on; it was important to her sculpturally and emotionally. She died a few days after its completion. ‘For me the resurrected Christ definitely has personal meaning, similar to that of the Green Man heads. They all symbolise rebirth.’ The light green plaster maquette of Risen Christ portrays a figure with a calm face, arms slightly outstretched, facing the future.
Animals darted between Frinks’ sculptures in her Dorset garden, and lithographs and bronzes of birds, dogs and horses appear throughout this show. They are a testament to the artist’s preoccupation with the unequal relationship between man and animals, and a link to Frink’s rural wartime childhood, when she would go out to shoot rabbits for the pot.
Faced with the acquisition of 400 artworks in 2020, following the death of Frink’s son Lin Jammet three years earlier, Dorset Museum and Gallery are coming to terms with a cornucopia of post-war British art. Breaking the spell of Frink’s ubiquity, and appraising her afresh as a key modern artist is not an overnight task. A View from Within’s biographical and contextual approach, positioning Frink in the art historical landscape through the objects she made in her Dorset studio, is a remarkable opening shot, not the last word.
Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within is showing at Dorset Museum until 21st April.
The pervasiveness of post-war sculptor Elisabeth Frink’s (1930-1993) work does not always aid appreciation and understanding. Familiar figures in the Royal Festival Hall, Salisbury Cathedral and Dorchester’s Gallows Hill, with the artist’s characteristic well-worked surfaces, make it tempting to pigeonhole Frink as an artist devoted mainly to representing animals and spirituality. Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within presents a reappraisal of the artist’s career by focusing on the last 20 years of her life spent at Woolland Studio, near Blandford Forum. In the exhibition, visitors plot their own course through the sculptor’s work, within the broad themes of her sociability with neighbours, such as War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, and friends including designer Jean Muir, the importance of her third husband Alex Csaky and the role of Woolland Studio’s landscape setting in her art.
A View from Within recreates an enviably bohemian existence, with an illustrated diary of the visit of Lis and Alex (as they were known to friends) to Muir’s Northumberland home Lorbottle Hall, noting BOLLINGER, in capitals, accompanied ‘herby sausages’. An album Csaky created for his wife, with photos of her at home, at work and on holiday, facing pages of handwritten extracts of the Earl of Rochester’s poetry and Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’, is a neighbouring object. An image of Frink modelling a red, draping Issey Miyake garment marks the designer’s 1985 campaign, in which he commissioned portraits by Lord Snowdon of creative women and men including Frink, Lucie Rie and Marina Warner.
A corner of the gallery is devoted to an evocation of Frink’s studio, complete with mallets, chisels and a Stanley knife, together with tiny maquettes of cows and Walking Man, the models for larger group works. Schubert’s Adagio played during my visit, evoking the classical playlist Frink kept scrawled above her studio sink - Grieg’s Last Spring, the track she chose for Desert Island Discs, will also be part of the soundtrack. Frink’s plaster-covered radio, tuned to a classical station, was turned on at 6.30am every morning when she started work.
Part-hidden in the sunken lanes of Blackmore Vale, with downs to the back, Woolland Studio’s grounds gave Frink the external space to test out the positioning of work for the first time. Larger artworks were moved and repositioned by tractor, and a graphite drawing for Flying Men (1982) gives an impression of the two helmeted, science fiction style figures, roped to invisible wings, that stood above Frink’s driveway for a few years. Commissioned for Brixton Estates in Dunstable, the work was inspired by the hang gliders who flew over Woolland, but also refences the myth of Icarus, and humanity’s propensity for destructive overconfidence.
Seated Man II (1986), on loan from Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was placed in various settings, gazing over paddocks, on the grass terrace, and beside the swimming pool as a focus for summer parties. The bronze giant with a green-tinged face, looking to the side and lost in thought, sits on the same makeshift seat Frink created while working on the plaster cast. Nude (1982), a sepia and black lithograph, studies the seated male nude from behind, with horizontal black hatching lending the muscular strength sensed in Seated Man II. Frink made her first seated male figure in 1954 to express man’s solitude and capacity for thought and reflection. For Frink, sculpting and drawing were related practices: ‘I think drawings and sculptures are really closely connected, and most of my drawings are ideas for sculptures.’
Frink’s contemplations of the darker aspects of human nature are captured in Goggle Head (1969) and Riace III (1988). The former is a large, slightly pockmarked, elongated head, portraying no expression as his eyes are hidden behind opaque bronze sunglasses. Her fascination with what was going on behind the sunglasses of the powerful was inspired by seeing a photograph of Moroccan military leader General Mohamed Oufkir during her time living in France. The inspiration for Riace III also predated her Woolland years, as the life-size standing figure is based on two Ancient Greek warriors recovered in 1971 from the sea near Riace in Calabria. Seeing the statues on a trip to Italy, the artist was fascinated by the inner conflict between hero warrior and mercenary thug. The menacing posture of the Riace, arms pulling away from the torso, fists clenched, expresses this contradiction, which is heightened by their ghostly, white-painted faces. They are a gang brutalised by aggression, yet rendered in bronze, the high-status art material linked to civilisation’s highest values.
Life’s fragility is a recurring theme in Frink’s work; in 1990, she was diagnosed with cancer and, faced with her own mortality, drew enormous inspiration and enjoyment from creating sculpture. Her hope for recovery fed a vision of regeneration, expressed in much of her final work. Walking Madonna (1981) - the statue walking away from the doors of Salisbury Cathedral - prefigures Frink’s final phase, with its ordinary, careworn woman walking back into life on elongated limbs beneath a simple robe, as best she can. Risen Christ (1992) for Liverpool Cathedral was Frink’s last commission and the only one for which she had studio assistance. She chose the subject of the resurrection because, although dying of cancer, she believed something of the spirit lived on; it was important to her sculpturally and emotionally. She died a few days after its completion. ‘For me the resurrected Christ definitely has personal meaning, similar to that of the Green Man heads. They all symbolise rebirth.’ The light green plaster maquette of Risen Christ portrays a figure with a calm face, arms slightly outstretched, facing the future.
Animals darted between Frinks’ sculptures in her Dorset garden, and lithographs and bronzes of birds, dogs and horses appear throughout this show. They are a testament to the artist’s preoccupation with the unequal relationship between man and animals, and a link to Frink’s rural wartime childhood, when she would go out to shoot rabbits for the pot.
Faced with the acquisition of 400 artworks in 2020, following the death of Frink’s son Lin Jammet three years earlier, Dorset Museum and Gallery are coming to terms with a cornucopia of post-war British art. Breaking the spell of Frink’s ubiquity, and appraising her afresh as a key modern artist is not an overnight task. A View from Within’s biographical and contextual approach, positioning Frink in the art historical landscape through the objects she made in her Dorset studio, is a remarkable opening shot, not the last word.
Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within is showing at Dorset Museum until 21st April.
The pervasiveness of post-war sculptor Elisabeth Frink’s (1930-1993) work does not always aid appreciation and understanding. Familiar figures in the Royal Festival Hall, Salisbury Cathedral and Dorchester’s Gallows Hill, with the artist’s characteristic well-worked surfaces, make it tempting to pigeonhole Frink as an artist devoted mainly to representing animals and spirituality. Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within presents a reappraisal of the artist’s career by focusing on the last 20 years of her life spent at Woolland Studio, near Blandford Forum. In the exhibition, visitors plot their own course through the sculptor’s work, within the broad themes of her sociability with neighbours, such as War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, and friends including designer Jean Muir, the importance of her third husband Alex Csaky and the role of Woolland Studio’s landscape setting in her art.
A View from Within recreates an enviably bohemian existence, with an illustrated diary of the visit of Lis and Alex (as they were known to friends) to Muir’s Northumberland home Lorbottle Hall, noting BOLLINGER, in capitals, accompanied ‘herby sausages’. An album Csaky created for his wife, with photos of her at home, at work and on holiday, facing pages of handwritten extracts of the Earl of Rochester’s poetry and Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’, is a neighbouring object. An image of Frink modelling a red, draping Issey Miyake garment marks the designer’s 1985 campaign, in which he commissioned portraits by Lord Snowdon of creative women and men including Frink, Lucie Rie and Marina Warner.
A corner of the gallery is devoted to an evocation of Frink’s studio, complete with mallets, chisels and a Stanley knife, together with tiny maquettes of cows and Walking Man, the models for larger group works. Schubert’s Adagio played during my visit, evoking the classical playlist Frink kept scrawled above her studio sink - Grieg’s Last Spring, the track she chose for Desert Island Discs, will also be part of the soundtrack. Frink’s plaster-covered radio, tuned to a classical station, was turned on at 6.30am every morning when she started work.
Part-hidden in the sunken lanes of Blackmore Vale, with downs to the back, Woolland Studio’s grounds gave Frink the external space to test out the positioning of work for the first time. Larger artworks were moved and repositioned by tractor, and a graphite drawing for Flying Men (1982) gives an impression of the two helmeted, science fiction style figures, roped to invisible wings, that stood above Frink’s driveway for a few years. Commissioned for Brixton Estates in Dunstable, the work was inspired by the hang gliders who flew over Woolland, but also refences the myth of Icarus, and humanity’s propensity for destructive overconfidence.
Seated Man II (1986), on loan from Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was placed in various settings, gazing over paddocks, on the grass terrace, and beside the swimming pool as a focus for summer parties. The bronze giant with a green-tinged face, looking to the side and lost in thought, sits on the same makeshift seat Frink created while working on the plaster cast. Nude (1982), a sepia and black lithograph, studies the seated male nude from behind, with horizontal black hatching lending the muscular strength sensed in Seated Man II. Frink made her first seated male figure in 1954 to express man’s solitude and capacity for thought and reflection. For Frink, sculpting and drawing were related practices: ‘I think drawings and sculptures are really closely connected, and most of my drawings are ideas for sculptures.’
Frink’s contemplations of the darker aspects of human nature are captured in Goggle Head (1969) and Riace III (1988). The former is a large, slightly pockmarked, elongated head, portraying no expression as his eyes are hidden behind opaque bronze sunglasses. Her fascination with what was going on behind the sunglasses of the powerful was inspired by seeing a photograph of Moroccan military leader General Mohamed Oufkir during her time living in France. The inspiration for Riace III also predated her Woolland years, as the life-size standing figure is based on two Ancient Greek warriors recovered in 1971 from the sea near Riace in Calabria. Seeing the statues on a trip to Italy, the artist was fascinated by the inner conflict between hero warrior and mercenary thug. The menacing posture of the Riace, arms pulling away from the torso, fists clenched, expresses this contradiction, which is heightened by their ghostly, white-painted faces. They are a gang brutalised by aggression, yet rendered in bronze, the high-status art material linked to civilisation’s highest values.
Life’s fragility is a recurring theme in Frink’s work; in 1990, she was diagnosed with cancer and, faced with her own mortality, drew enormous inspiration and enjoyment from creating sculpture. Her hope for recovery fed a vision of regeneration, expressed in much of her final work. Walking Madonna (1981) - the statue walking away from the doors of Salisbury Cathedral - prefigures Frink’s final phase, with its ordinary, careworn woman walking back into life on elongated limbs beneath a simple robe, as best she can. Risen Christ (1992) for Liverpool Cathedral was Frink’s last commission and the only one for which she had studio assistance. She chose the subject of the resurrection because, although dying of cancer, she believed something of the spirit lived on; it was important to her sculpturally and emotionally. She died a few days after its completion. ‘For me the resurrected Christ definitely has personal meaning, similar to that of the Green Man heads. They all symbolise rebirth.’ The light green plaster maquette of Risen Christ portrays a figure with a calm face, arms slightly outstretched, facing the future.
Animals darted between Frinks’ sculptures in her Dorset garden, and lithographs and bronzes of birds, dogs and horses appear throughout this show. They are a testament to the artist’s preoccupation with the unequal relationship between man and animals, and a link to Frink’s rural wartime childhood, when she would go out to shoot rabbits for the pot.
Faced with the acquisition of 400 artworks in 2020, following the death of Frink’s son Lin Jammet three years earlier, Dorset Museum and Gallery are coming to terms with a cornucopia of post-war British art. Breaking the spell of Frink’s ubiquity, and appraising her afresh as a key modern artist is not an overnight task. A View from Within’s biographical and contextual approach, positioning Frink in the art historical landscape through the objects she made in her Dorset studio, is a remarkable opening shot, not the last word.
Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within is showing at Dorset Museum until 21st April.
The pervasiveness of post-war sculptor Elisabeth Frink’s (1930-1993) work does not always aid appreciation and understanding. Familiar figures in the Royal Festival Hall, Salisbury Cathedral and Dorchester’s Gallows Hill, with the artist’s characteristic well-worked surfaces, make it tempting to pigeonhole Frink as an artist devoted mainly to representing animals and spirituality. Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within presents a reappraisal of the artist’s career by focusing on the last 20 years of her life spent at Woolland Studio, near Blandford Forum. In the exhibition, visitors plot their own course through the sculptor’s work, within the broad themes of her sociability with neighbours, such as War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, and friends including designer Jean Muir, the importance of her third husband Alex Csaky and the role of Woolland Studio’s landscape setting in her art.
A View from Within recreates an enviably bohemian existence, with an illustrated diary of the visit of Lis and Alex (as they were known to friends) to Muir’s Northumberland home Lorbottle Hall, noting BOLLINGER, in capitals, accompanied ‘herby sausages’. An album Csaky created for his wife, with photos of her at home, at work and on holiday, facing pages of handwritten extracts of the Earl of Rochester’s poetry and Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’, is a neighbouring object. An image of Frink modelling a red, draping Issey Miyake garment marks the designer’s 1985 campaign, in which he commissioned portraits by Lord Snowdon of creative women and men including Frink, Lucie Rie and Marina Warner.
A corner of the gallery is devoted to an evocation of Frink’s studio, complete with mallets, chisels and a Stanley knife, together with tiny maquettes of cows and Walking Man, the models for larger group works. Schubert’s Adagio played during my visit, evoking the classical playlist Frink kept scrawled above her studio sink - Grieg’s Last Spring, the track she chose for Desert Island Discs, will also be part of the soundtrack. Frink’s plaster-covered radio, tuned to a classical station, was turned on at 6.30am every morning when she started work.
Part-hidden in the sunken lanes of Blackmore Vale, with downs to the back, Woolland Studio’s grounds gave Frink the external space to test out the positioning of work for the first time. Larger artworks were moved and repositioned by tractor, and a graphite drawing for Flying Men (1982) gives an impression of the two helmeted, science fiction style figures, roped to invisible wings, that stood above Frink’s driveway for a few years. Commissioned for Brixton Estates in Dunstable, the work was inspired by the hang gliders who flew over Woolland, but also refences the myth of Icarus, and humanity’s propensity for destructive overconfidence.
Seated Man II (1986), on loan from Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was placed in various settings, gazing over paddocks, on the grass terrace, and beside the swimming pool as a focus for summer parties. The bronze giant with a green-tinged face, looking to the side and lost in thought, sits on the same makeshift seat Frink created while working on the plaster cast. Nude (1982), a sepia and black lithograph, studies the seated male nude from behind, with horizontal black hatching lending the muscular strength sensed in Seated Man II. Frink made her first seated male figure in 1954 to express man’s solitude and capacity for thought and reflection. For Frink, sculpting and drawing were related practices: ‘I think drawings and sculptures are really closely connected, and most of my drawings are ideas for sculptures.’
Frink’s contemplations of the darker aspects of human nature are captured in Goggle Head (1969) and Riace III (1988). The former is a large, slightly pockmarked, elongated head, portraying no expression as his eyes are hidden behind opaque bronze sunglasses. Her fascination with what was going on behind the sunglasses of the powerful was inspired by seeing a photograph of Moroccan military leader General Mohamed Oufkir during her time living in France. The inspiration for Riace III also predated her Woolland years, as the life-size standing figure is based on two Ancient Greek warriors recovered in 1971 from the sea near Riace in Calabria. Seeing the statues on a trip to Italy, the artist was fascinated by the inner conflict between hero warrior and mercenary thug. The menacing posture of the Riace, arms pulling away from the torso, fists clenched, expresses this contradiction, which is heightened by their ghostly, white-painted faces. They are a gang brutalised by aggression, yet rendered in bronze, the high-status art material linked to civilisation’s highest values.
Life’s fragility is a recurring theme in Frink’s work; in 1990, she was diagnosed with cancer and, faced with her own mortality, drew enormous inspiration and enjoyment from creating sculpture. Her hope for recovery fed a vision of regeneration, expressed in much of her final work. Walking Madonna (1981) - the statue walking away from the doors of Salisbury Cathedral - prefigures Frink’s final phase, with its ordinary, careworn woman walking back into life on elongated limbs beneath a simple robe, as best she can. Risen Christ (1992) for Liverpool Cathedral was Frink’s last commission and the only one for which she had studio assistance. She chose the subject of the resurrection because, although dying of cancer, she believed something of the spirit lived on; it was important to her sculpturally and emotionally. She died a few days after its completion. ‘For me the resurrected Christ definitely has personal meaning, similar to that of the Green Man heads. They all symbolise rebirth.’ The light green plaster maquette of Risen Christ portrays a figure with a calm face, arms slightly outstretched, facing the future.
Animals darted between Frinks’ sculptures in her Dorset garden, and lithographs and bronzes of birds, dogs and horses appear throughout this show. They are a testament to the artist’s preoccupation with the unequal relationship between man and animals, and a link to Frink’s rural wartime childhood, when she would go out to shoot rabbits for the pot.
Faced with the acquisition of 400 artworks in 2020, following the death of Frink’s son Lin Jammet three years earlier, Dorset Museum and Gallery are coming to terms with a cornucopia of post-war British art. Breaking the spell of Frink’s ubiquity, and appraising her afresh as a key modern artist is not an overnight task. A View from Within’s biographical and contextual approach, positioning Frink in the art historical landscape through the objects she made in her Dorset studio, is a remarkable opening shot, not the last word.
Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within is showing at Dorset Museum until 21st April.
The pervasiveness of post-war sculptor Elisabeth Frink’s (1930-1993) work does not always aid appreciation and understanding. Familiar figures in the Royal Festival Hall, Salisbury Cathedral and Dorchester’s Gallows Hill, with the artist’s characteristic well-worked surfaces, make it tempting to pigeonhole Frink as an artist devoted mainly to representing animals and spirituality. Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within presents a reappraisal of the artist’s career by focusing on the last 20 years of her life spent at Woolland Studio, near Blandford Forum. In the exhibition, visitors plot their own course through the sculptor’s work, within the broad themes of her sociability with neighbours, such as War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, and friends including designer Jean Muir, the importance of her third husband Alex Csaky and the role of Woolland Studio’s landscape setting in her art.
A View from Within recreates an enviably bohemian existence, with an illustrated diary of the visit of Lis and Alex (as they were known to friends) to Muir’s Northumberland home Lorbottle Hall, noting BOLLINGER, in capitals, accompanied ‘herby sausages’. An album Csaky created for his wife, with photos of her at home, at work and on holiday, facing pages of handwritten extracts of the Earl of Rochester’s poetry and Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’, is a neighbouring object. An image of Frink modelling a red, draping Issey Miyake garment marks the designer’s 1985 campaign, in which he commissioned portraits by Lord Snowdon of creative women and men including Frink, Lucie Rie and Marina Warner.
A corner of the gallery is devoted to an evocation of Frink’s studio, complete with mallets, chisels and a Stanley knife, together with tiny maquettes of cows and Walking Man, the models for larger group works. Schubert’s Adagio played during my visit, evoking the classical playlist Frink kept scrawled above her studio sink - Grieg’s Last Spring, the track she chose for Desert Island Discs, will also be part of the soundtrack. Frink’s plaster-covered radio, tuned to a classical station, was turned on at 6.30am every morning when she started work.
Part-hidden in the sunken lanes of Blackmore Vale, with downs to the back, Woolland Studio’s grounds gave Frink the external space to test out the positioning of work for the first time. Larger artworks were moved and repositioned by tractor, and a graphite drawing for Flying Men (1982) gives an impression of the two helmeted, science fiction style figures, roped to invisible wings, that stood above Frink’s driveway for a few years. Commissioned for Brixton Estates in Dunstable, the work was inspired by the hang gliders who flew over Woolland, but also refences the myth of Icarus, and humanity’s propensity for destructive overconfidence.
Seated Man II (1986), on loan from Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was placed in various settings, gazing over paddocks, on the grass terrace, and beside the swimming pool as a focus for summer parties. The bronze giant with a green-tinged face, looking to the side and lost in thought, sits on the same makeshift seat Frink created while working on the plaster cast. Nude (1982), a sepia and black lithograph, studies the seated male nude from behind, with horizontal black hatching lending the muscular strength sensed in Seated Man II. Frink made her first seated male figure in 1954 to express man’s solitude and capacity for thought and reflection. For Frink, sculpting and drawing were related practices: ‘I think drawings and sculptures are really closely connected, and most of my drawings are ideas for sculptures.’
Frink’s contemplations of the darker aspects of human nature are captured in Goggle Head (1969) and Riace III (1988). The former is a large, slightly pockmarked, elongated head, portraying no expression as his eyes are hidden behind opaque bronze sunglasses. Her fascination with what was going on behind the sunglasses of the powerful was inspired by seeing a photograph of Moroccan military leader General Mohamed Oufkir during her time living in France. The inspiration for Riace III also predated her Woolland years, as the life-size standing figure is based on two Ancient Greek warriors recovered in 1971 from the sea near Riace in Calabria. Seeing the statues on a trip to Italy, the artist was fascinated by the inner conflict between hero warrior and mercenary thug. The menacing posture of the Riace, arms pulling away from the torso, fists clenched, expresses this contradiction, which is heightened by their ghostly, white-painted faces. They are a gang brutalised by aggression, yet rendered in bronze, the high-status art material linked to civilisation’s highest values.
Life’s fragility is a recurring theme in Frink’s work; in 1990, she was diagnosed with cancer and, faced with her own mortality, drew enormous inspiration and enjoyment from creating sculpture. Her hope for recovery fed a vision of regeneration, expressed in much of her final work. Walking Madonna (1981) - the statue walking away from the doors of Salisbury Cathedral - prefigures Frink’s final phase, with its ordinary, careworn woman walking back into life on elongated limbs beneath a simple robe, as best she can. Risen Christ (1992) for Liverpool Cathedral was Frink’s last commission and the only one for which she had studio assistance. She chose the subject of the resurrection because, although dying of cancer, she believed something of the spirit lived on; it was important to her sculpturally and emotionally. She died a few days after its completion. ‘For me the resurrected Christ definitely has personal meaning, similar to that of the Green Man heads. They all symbolise rebirth.’ The light green plaster maquette of Risen Christ portrays a figure with a calm face, arms slightly outstretched, facing the future.
Animals darted between Frinks’ sculptures in her Dorset garden, and lithographs and bronzes of birds, dogs and horses appear throughout this show. They are a testament to the artist’s preoccupation with the unequal relationship between man and animals, and a link to Frink’s rural wartime childhood, when she would go out to shoot rabbits for the pot.
Faced with the acquisition of 400 artworks in 2020, following the death of Frink’s son Lin Jammet three years earlier, Dorset Museum and Gallery are coming to terms with a cornucopia of post-war British art. Breaking the spell of Frink’s ubiquity, and appraising her afresh as a key modern artist is not an overnight task. A View from Within’s biographical and contextual approach, positioning Frink in the art historical landscape through the objects she made in her Dorset studio, is a remarkable opening shot, not the last word.
Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within is showing at Dorset Museum until 21st April.
