By Jeremy Miles
Dorset wasn’t just home to the late celebrated sculptor Dame Elisabeth Frink, it was a place of refuge and inspiration, providing the perfect environment for both work and play. She spent the final 16 years of her life in the county creating powerful, groundbreaking art and entertaining visiting friends at her beautiful country estate, Woolland House near Blandford Forum.
After many years living in France and London, the increasingly famous and successful Frink and her third husband Alex Csáky, discovered Woolland in the mid-1970s and instantly knew that they had found a country base in a wonderful location that offered all that they required.
Nestling beneath Bulbarrow Hill on the edge of the Blackmore Vale and in an area of outstanding natural beauty, the house and its grounds were a haven of tranquillity surrounded by spectacular views across the ancient Dorset landscape. It provided an inspirational location for Frink’s studio that wasn’t too remote from the London art world or the foundries that cast her often giant bronze sculptures.
Frink had trained at Chelsea School of Art in the 1950s and found early fame with her massive male figures and naturalistic sculptures of horses and dogs. She would go on to become one of the towering figures of British art driven by a sense of compassion and known for an unwavering interest in the nature of man and the laws of the natural world. She was elected as a Royal Academician in 1977 and appointed a Dame of the British Empire in 1982.
Today she is best known for her public sculptures which can be seen in a diverse array of locations nationally and internationally including Salisbury, Coventry and Liverpool cathedrals and of course much closer to home, like her Dorset Martyrs Memorial at South Walks, Dorchester, which stands on the site of the gallows where Catholic martyrs were hanged in the 16th and 17th centuries.
But there were many smaller studio works too, including both sculptures and prints and by the time she moved to Dorset there were increasing demands on her time and she needed space and a creative environment to continue developing her art.
Woolland soon became the focus of not only Frink’s intense and disciplined work schedule but also a joyous place for her and Alex to invite their wide circle of friends for fun weekends and long happy meals. Above all it felt like home and in a way it always had been. For although Elisabeth Frink was born in Suffolk in 1930, she had first found Dorset during the Second World War when her Army officer father was posted to the county and her family temporarily moved to the Purbeck village of Kingston.
She was just 11 years old but memories of discovering the area and places like Kimmeridge, Dancing Ledge and Corfe Castle remained with her, helping to establish her singular artistic style. Moving to Woolland allowed her to find the place that she felt was her true spiritual home. Her life there with Alex was intensely happy and productive but sadly cut short when they were both stricken by illness and died within weeks of each other in 2003.
Frink was just 63 years old when she died but her artistic legacy lives on. She had long let it be known that she wanted the county to be the permanent home of her considerable archive.
Thanks to her estate many of her works are held by the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester and now, 30 years after her death, it is staging the first-ever exhibition dedicated to her time living and working at Woolland.
Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within runs until April and showcases more than 80 of her sculptures, drawings and prints including working plasters that informed her final bronze sculptures that have never been on public display before.
The show examines her working processes, recreating part of her Dorset studio with a collection of her tools and the plasters that formed the basis of some of her best-known bronze sculptures. It displays many quintessential Frink works like Seated Man, Goggle Heads, Walking Madonna, The Dorset Martyrs and there’s even her wonderful maquette for Risen Christ, the piece that turned out to be her final commission.
The inclusion of the work in the show underlines the fact that despite suffering from the cancer that would kill her, this determined and brilliant woman worked right up until the end of the end of her life. The completed work which today towers over the western doors of Liverpool Cathedral was unveiled just days before her death.
As well as revealing something of both Frink’s artistic practices and her joy of life, this is a fascinating exhibition that gives visitors the chance to explore the importance of her years in Dorset through both her art and a selection of personal possessions, including letters and photographs.
Although relatively compact, this is an important show that has been beautifully designed by its co-curators Annette Ratuszniak and Lucy Johnston. With carefully selected lighting that particularly highlights the unique carving of Frink’s bronzes, it has a thematic layout that takes the visitor through sections dedicated to Family and Social Life, Printmaking, Spirituality and Humanism, Interdependence of Species, Human Rights and New Beginnings.
One intriguing addition to the exhibition is Small Warrior – the 12-inch tall bronze sculpture bought for £90 at a car-boot sale in Essex. The piece was recently the subject of BBC1’s Fake or Fortune? Was it the real deal or just a relatively worthless hunk of metal? For a while the jury was out but after exhaustive scientific tests and expert analysis it was declared to be a genuine rediscovery of a lost Frink original from the 1950s which could be worth £60,000.
*Elisabeth Frink: A View From Within runs at the Dorset Museum and Art Gallery in High West Street, Dorchester DT1 1XA until 21st April 2024. Further information at http://www.dorsetmuseum.org
*This piece was originally published in the January 2024 edition of Dorset magazine.
