‘I have focused on the male because to me he is a subtle combination of sensuality and strength with vulnerability.’
Throughout her career, and indeed from early in her life, Elisabeth Frink was preoccupied with the idea of ‘maleness.’ We see in her sculptures a search for archetypes: her men are heroes, they are villains, there is strength, but she is also interested in vulnerability. This is evident in her horse and rider figures - the nude male exposed atop a powerful mount - and again in her Tribute Heads - universal images of man’s suffering, but also their resilience. They represent a masculine ideal, but not one of force or outward bravado, rather a refined and powerful stoicism.
Frink’s father was a soldier in the Second World War and while missing for much of her childhood, may have been part of the reason she became fixated with male iconography. As she states:
‘I had a great admiration for men from an early age. This was partly because my father was extremely handsome. I was used to meeting his colleagues - his fellow officers - and they were very glamorous in their uniforms: cavalry boots and things like that. Men were very much part of my early life because of the army. I used to look up to them, and hero-worship them’
During the war Frink lived in Suffolk and came in contact with aircraft and pilots of the Great Bomber Command. A group of Polish airmen were frequent visitors to her family home and it is perhaps here she first came face to face with the contrast between outward male vigour and each of our inherent fragility, as she witnessed planes arriving back on the airfield on fire or heard of those lost in action.
This first hand observation of man’s brutality to man remained rooted in Frink’s psyche and was a subject that occupied her artistic output. In the 1960s she began a series of monumental male busts- entitled Goggle Head. Frink was gript by a photo of General Oufkir - a man who was responsible for the death of an Algerian freedom fighter. His boorish face, inscrutable due to the sunglasses he wore, became the inspiration for the brutal, harsh, mindless and eternal heads she produced. They embody masculinity, with their pronounced jaws and thick proportions recalling such historic precursors as the Colossus of Constantine, Rome. While inspired by a pictorial source, the heads are purposefully anonymous; they remain universal symbols of male aggression and self-aggrandisement.
‘[They] are perhaps a comment on where we are heading: as far as I can see, towards a new dark age in human relations. They are about peace and freedom of spirit: people have been through the horrors and got through to the other side. They are not political prisoners, but maybe they were.’
Following this series, Frink moved on to the Tribute Heads, which in some ways act as the Goggle Head’s counterpoint. Going from one extreme of human nature to another, they are symbols of fortitude following extreme suffering: refined, restrained, serene and internal representations. A long supporter of Amnesty International, the Tribute Heads were done as a type of homage to the human rights group, but it was suffering generally that interested her, regardless of the time or historical source. They are not individuals; they are emblems of survival. This idea of martyrdom and suffering for a cause continued in her sculpture in works such as In Memoriam (1981) and Christ (1983), a monumental bust which in its pared down depiction of the face, smooth pronounced features, eyes closed and beardless, bears many similarities to the Tribute Heads.