Bird

Frink received incredible early success and acclaim. She was still an art student at Chelsea, and only 22 years old, when the Tate bought ‘Bird’, from an exhibition at the Beaux Art Gallery in London. Birds were a common pre-occupation for both Frink and her contemporaries in the 1950s. She said later that they were “really vehicles for strong feelings of pain, tension, aggression and predatoriness”. She was trying to come to terms with the terrors of the Second World War that had just passed, tracing what the art critic Herbert Read called ‘the geometry of fear’. This referred to the generation of British sculptors at the 1952 Venice Biennale (Frink was just too young to have been selected for this) - artists such as Bernard Meadows, Reg Butler and Lynn Chadwick, whose spiky and anthropomorphic forms became synonymous with post-war British sculpture. Frink understood that the aptness of her ‘birds’ to that historical moment in the 1950s had undoubtedly played a role in winning her early recognition.

When looking at these works it is important to note that Frink’s birds are not really creatures of the air. Rather, they are usually planted more or less on human legs. The bird is braced against the ground and has lunged forward to seize a prey in its formidable beak. Frink said of these works “I suppose most of my early pieces - bird forms and bird men - started with being brought up in the country, where I was surrounded with birds. I got very interested in ravens and crows as a shape - sharp-beaked, splintery-type birds - and I think all my imagery was already there when I went to art school … The forms I sculpted (at art school) were the ones which were 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, birdmen. I’m sure that was it”.