A geometry of compassion | Elisabeth Frink, at Salisbury Museum and British Art Fair

*Elisabeth Frink, Walking Madonna at Salisbury Cathedral. Photography by Martin Cook*

Elisabeth Frink’s Walking Madonna strides away from Salisbury Cathedral, dignified suffering etched into her middle-aged face. Cast in bronze, she seems anything but static. Her forward motion is palpable, her grief kinetic. Is she fleeing the trauma of bereavement, or walking toward some hard-won reckoning? Frink, as ever, left the question open. The sculpture, all coiled resolve, exudes an aura of stoic endurance. This is no geometry of fear – it’s a geometry of compassion.

Walking Madonna is a permanent fixture in the grounds of the elegant 13th-century cathedral. She was fashioned by Frink just 20 miles away, in the studio of Woolland House near Blandford Forum, where the sculptor spent the last 17 years of her life. In Salisbury Museum, overlooking the cathedral grounds, a current touring exhibition explores how that purpose-built studio – with its high ceiling and generous windows – allowed Frink to spread her wings in her autumn years.

Among the works on show is a watercolour riff on the Madonna, a study in loose brushwork and emotional clarity. You marvel at how Frink managed to translate such fluidity into bronze. Her sculpting technique has been described as a kind of dance: circling the plaster-covered armature of steel and chicken wire, chipping away, then smoothing back, working from memory and instinct, forever improvising.

Standing Horse by Elisabeth Frink, 1993. Dorset Museum collection 2020.1.100. Artist copyright in image kindly approved by Tully and Bree Jammet.

Frink moved to Woolland House, a recently restored seven-bedroom country home, set in a 17-acre estate, in 1976, with her third husband, the publisher and businessman Alex Csáky. The two lived there very happily until 1993, the year they both died, frequently entertaining guests and spending time with a menagerie of animals wandering the grounds among Frink’s bronze creations: hens, dogs, and, of course, horses. Frink loved horses, learning to ride at four years old and producing countless equine sculptures, paintings and drawings. Her Times obituary noted the three essential themes in her work as ‘the nature of Man; the horseness of horses; and the divine in human form’.

However much champagne was drunk the night before with her houseguests, and however little sleep Frink managed to get (she was beset by nightmares related to her upbringing near an airfield in WW2 Suffolk), she was in her studio at 6.30am, ready for the get-go. The radio dial was set on Radio 3: Mozart was her favourite composer to sculpt to. Here she created plaster casts of some of her most enduring works: the Dorset Martyrs, forever suffering in dignity in Dorchester, Warhorse, grazing pondside at Chatworth House, Risen Christ, her final work, unveiled above the West Doors of Liverpool Cathedral a week before her death from cancer in 1993.

In 2020 Frink’s son Lin Jammet bequeathed her estate and archive to the nation, and it was divided between 12 public galleries in the UK. Dorset Museum and Gallery received over 400 works, including sculptures, prints, drawings and paintings, as well as the tools of her trade and other personal items. Many of the later works, mostly created in Woolland House, were exhibited at that museum in 2024, and this smaller version of the exhibition, titled A View from Within, is on show in Salisbury until September 28.

Elisabeth Frink working on the Dorset Martyr group, 1985. D-FRK/1/10/7/2/6 © Anthony Marshall/Courtesy of Dorset History Centre. Artist copyright in image kindly approved by Tully and Bree Jammet

The show has been rather over-captioned, and eighty pieces have been crammed into the two-room space available, but – hey – you can’t get too much of a good thing. There’s a Goggle Head study of the banality of evil, an ever-curious Standing Horse, maquettes of the Dorset Martyrs, a menacing, rather abstract Small Bird, and a painting of her muscle-bound Seated Man, which once crouched by the side of her swimming pool. There are numerous photographs of Frink, notably one of her at work, sitting astride her life-size Warhorse, and another, taken by Lord Snowden, of the artist modelling an Issey Miyake dress. And there are several examples of her printmaking, including a startled and startling Red Dog and a sinister Cyclops from Homer’s Odyssey.

The exhibition is as much about Woolland House, as it is about Elisabeth Frink. Or rather, it is about how the artist – previously peripatetic with homes in Suffolk, Devon, Guildford, London and France – communed with her surroundings, helping her to produce the most accomplished work of her long and successful career. Where her earlier homes had reflected restlessness or transition, Woolland embodied permanence and calm. It allowed her to work on monumental pieces without spatial compromise and to live surrounded by her own work, her bronze sculptures repositioned around the grounds by tractor until they ‘found the right spot’. One might assume that such comfort could have dulled the raw edge of Frink’s work; yet it’s arguable that the domestic calm of her final home enabled an even deeper, more distilled existential clarity.

Elisabeth Frink, Large Bird, 1966, Bronze Cast. Courtesy Cornish Masters

Has there been an edition of the British Art Fair without Elisabeth Frink? The 2025 Fair promises to be particularly Frink-rich. Cornish Masters will exhibit one of her six Large Bird sculptures (1966), encapsulating both menace and vulnerability: ‘wounds and weapons’, as the artist put it. Osborne Samuel and Jenna Burlingham are showing maquettes for the Water Buffalo sculptures (1988), commissioned for Exchange Square Parlour in Hong Kong. One stands, the other lies down – will a canny collector acquire the pair? Blond Contemporary offers Chinese Horse Standing III, reflecting Frink’s engagement with primitive equine forms and their mythic resonance. Eames Fine Art are showing several screenprints including Red Dog (1990), Green Man (Grey) (1992) and Grey Horse Head (1992), each charged with her signature blend of physicality and psychological depth. Finally, Christopher Kingzett brings Head of Christ (1983), a graphite-on-paper piece drawn two years after Walking Madonna was installed outside Salisbury Cathedral. This naked-torsoed Jesus is clearly on the cross, his face echoing the same humble, dignified endurance of his mother, eternally striding away from Salisbury Cathedral’s spindle spire.

A geometry of compassion | Elisabeth Frink, at Salisbury Museum and British Art Fair

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