Born in Suffolk in 1930, Elisabeth Frink was an English sculptor and printmaker. World War II broke out shortly before Frink's ninth birthday providing context for some of her earliest artistic works and growing up near a military airfield she frequently heard bombers returning from their missions. On one occasion she was even forced to hide under a hedge to avoid the machine gun attack of a German fighter plane. Her father too had been at Dunkirk as a serving officer in the cavalry and some of her early drawings have a powerful apocalyptic flavour with themes including wounded birds and falling men. During the course of the War Frink was evacuated with her mother and brother to Devon. She attended Guildford School of Art and later Chelsea School of Art and was part of a post-war group of artists known as the Geometry of Fear, a phrase coined by Herbert Read in his review of the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1952 describing the distorted forms and the power-struggle of man in post-war times. She was made a member of the RA in 1977 and made a Dame in 1982 and a Companion of Honour in 1993 before her death.
