Two Lives Shaped by Sculpture: Elisabeth Frink and Bridget McCrum

 

‘Make it bigger!’ That was the one recommendation Elisabeth Frink gave to Bridget McCrum when she commissioned her to carve an enormous stone bottom for her garden in Dorset in 1984. The sculpture was to be a version of the one on display at the Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition that year – a piece that had been entered into the show by McCrum’s husband, Bobby, with the encouragement of her old friend, Frink, entirely without McCrum’s knowledge, whilst she was away on an expedition in Somalia. McCrum would never have dared to presume that her work was good enough for the hallowed halls of the RA, but Bobby and Lis knew better and entered the work on her behalf, both feeling that it was high time Bridget received the recognition she deserved.

Frink and McCrum had been friends since childhood, when, in 1940, the six-year-old McCrum was evacuated to escape the London Blitz, and sent to Devon to stay with a woman named Adgie Sweet, who had been taking in the daughters of British army officers stationed in Asia during the Second World War. Another of the twelve girls in Sweet’s care was her goddaughter, Frink, whose father was then serving in France. Although Frink was four years older than McCrum, the two shared much in common – not least a love of horses, a keen sense of fun and a passion for art – and they became like sisters, staying up reading and drawing horses together until the light faded, and running down to the railway lines to place pennies on the tracks for the trains to flatten. 

After the war, Frink and McCrum returned to their families, but they kept in touch. Frink began in the painting department at Guildford School of Art in 1947, but quickly transitioned to sculpture, and moved to Chelsea School of Art in 1949. McCrum, too, pursued her ambition to become an artist, but her family didn’t approve of the bohemian lifestyle of a London art student (exemplified by Frink), and so she was sent to the local art college in Farnham, where she also studied painting under the Polish artist Leszek Muszynski. 

Both artists married in the mid-1950s, but whereas, for Frink, work came before family, McCrum made the decision to temporarily forgo her career in order to raise her children. She returned to art in her mid-thirties, however, and began to create sculpture in stone, the medium to which she had been drawn since childhood. Frink was hugely supportive of her friend and the two often spoke about sculpture (a rare occurrence for Frink, who seldom discussed her work with anyone). 

In many ways, Frink and McCrum worked at opposite ends of the spectrum of sculpture; Frink’s process was essentially additive, layering plaster onto a metal armature to build up form, whereas McCrum’s is reductive, carving out her desired shape from a solid block of stone. Although she briefly experimented with abstraction, Frink remained wedded to representational figuration as her primary means of expression. McCrum, on the other hand, abandoned the representation of the human form in the early 1990s, and has embarked on a steady trajectory towards abstraction ever since. However, they still shared much in common: their love of travel, for example, and their fascination with ancient cultures; and the fact that both artists have preferred to see their sculptures nestled in the landscape, existing as entities in the world, rather than confined to interior spaces. Frink and McCrum’s oeuvres also display a common search for archetypes. Their animal subjects, for instance, are not slavish representations of particular species; instead they convey the essence of the animal in sculpture, exploring its different physical and mental attitudes. For both women, drawing is the basis of all art, and in their work, negative space is as important as positive form in creating the energy that emanates from all great art. In the late 1980s they simultaneously became fascinated by the processes of experimental bronze patination, and as neither liked working with assistants, both determined that they would colour their sculptures themselves, splashing toxic chemicals onto the surface of the bronze and applying heat to create all manner of rich colours and textures. 

Seen together in the context of a gallery, Frink and McCrum’s sculpture does not immediately appear to speak the same language; as artists, they had many different preoccupations and intentions. Yet showing their work together brings to light a story of friendship between two important female sculptors of the last century – a kinship based upon shared passion and mutual respect.

Wilfrid Wright

June 2024

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