Lesson Three: Elisabeth Frink’s Harbinger Bird III

ACTIVITY

With these questions still fresh in your mind, write a short description, pulling together your visual observations and your more personal responses.

FROM THE ARTIST’S PERSPECTIVE

At Chelsea] the forms I sculpted were the ones which were the most natural to me – animal and bird forms from Suffolk.  However, I changed them enormously because they became much more like something else.  They turned, almost, into a sort of bird-madness: quite fearsome, I think.  Probably they were influenced by the aeroplanes I saw in the war – the equation was aeroplanes, flying machines flying men, birdman.  I’m sure that was it.

Frink: A Portrait, Edward Lucie Smith, 1994.

The very rough textured work I did then was mainly of bird forms which came from childhood memories; from being brought up in the country, mixed up with certain aspects of the war which of course affected me.

And the ideas: birdmen, birds which were rather horrific, predatory creatures: the animal forms were rather tortured.  Plaster lent itself very much to this aggressive, rough texture.

Interview with Normal Rostenthal, Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture and Drawings 1952-1984.  Exhibition Catalogue, Royal Academy, 1985, pp21-31. 

They (the birds) changed a lot.  As they went through, they became harbingers. More blunt.  Kind of, rather prehistoric looking creatures, maybe the surviving shell of something, slightly blasted.  It’s part raven.  So it’s predatory.

All my sculptures after that for quite a while became armour plated.  Partly because it’s the way I built up.  I use bits of plaster that have been thrown out and put them together to make up these big areas of textured plates, so to speak…  Bottoms of bowls and things like that.  I used to pick up interesting pieces that I thought would fit together to make a carapace.

British Library Sounds. National Life Story Collection: Artists’ Lives. Elisabeth Frink. 4/7.  00.18:40 – 00:20:24.

The birds at that time were really expressionist in feeling.  That is, emphasis on beak, claws and wings – and they were really vehicles for strong feelings of panic, tension, aggression and predatoriness.

Interview with Bryan Robertson, in Elisabeth Frink Sculpture. Catalogue Raisonne, Jill Willder, Ed., 1984.

It was a mixture of two things.  Being brought up in the country and being surrounded by wildlife which I incorporated as vehicles for what I want to say.  And flight.  So I was obsessed with flight and aeroplanes crashing.  They crashed all around us.  It was terrifying to see them coming down, the planes.  I used to have bad dreams.  We used to rush up the next day, like a lot of little ghouls, and we were allowed to pick up old bits of shrapnel, and parachute silk, and old bullet cases.

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I still have dreams…they’re still rooted in fear.

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Air raids were frightening.  I mean, goodness me, you were bombed and machine gunned in Exmouth in Devon in broad daylight. I was walking along the front, and we just had to rush up the bank and throw ourselves down.  So of course, there were aspects that were frightening.

My birds of prey became something else.  They became like bits of shrapnel and flying things.  You know with the very sharp beaks.

British Library Sounds. National Life Story Collection: Artists’ Lives. Elisabeth Frink. 2/7.  00.10:20 – 00:16:18.

We’ve seen how Frink’s work was able to tap into the spirit of the times through a language both deeply personal and universal, creating a space for a powerful range of personal responses for the viewer. But does a work like Harbinger Bird III still have anything to tell us about ourselves and our relationship with the natural world?

Listen to this podcast where I posed the same question to Sarah Wade, Lecturer in Museum Studies in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at UEA.  Sarah’s research focuses on human-animal relations in contemporary art, particularly with regards to ecological concerns.  I asked her where those interests came from, and how that frames the way she looks at a work like Frink’s Harbinger Bird III. I was fascinated to hear her thoughts on how Frink blurs the boundary between human and animal, and the implications of that for us now.