Images of Christ: Strength in weakness

Rowena Loverance considers a sculpture by Elisabeth Frink

Elisabeth Frink never employed any help modelling her characteristically vigorous sculptures of men, dogs, birds and horses. When asked why she rarely worked with the female form, she replied: ‘I have focused on the male because to me he is a subtle combination of sensuality and strength with vulnerability.’

For her last work, though, made when she was dying from cancer, she was too weak to work alone, and had to use an assistant. The result was the Risen Christ, the over-life size bronze unveiled on the west front of Liverpool Anglican Cathedral in April 1993, just days before she died – she watched the ceremony on TV.

Elisabeth Frink was brought up as a Catholic and, though she moved away from established religion, her affinity with the spiritual was clear in her work. During her life she produced a variety of images of Christ. In 1964 she made a Risen Christ for a church in Solihull, Birmingham; a sharp-featured, almost Olympian figure, which showed the influence of Greek sculpture. The head of Christ she made for a church in Basingstoke in 1983 was clearly related to her previous series of Tribute Heads, referencing people who had died for their beliefs.

While recuperating from her first bout of cancer, she read about the Green Man, a motif found in Roman as well as medieval art. These ideas of rebirth and regeneration bore fruit in her Green Man head (1991), and also found their way into the Liverpool commission. Of this, she wrote: ‘I wanted it to be a very simple, primitive figure… For me this resurrected Christ definitely has a personal meaning, similar to that of the Green Man heads. They all symbolise a rebirth, a renewal of spirit and mind.’

Naked except for a simple loincloth and holding out his wounded palms, Elisabeth Frink’s figure is thirteen feet high, but from below seems almost stocky. Perched precariously on his plinth, he perfectly incorporates the tension between strength and vulnerability which is at the heart of the artist’s work.

It is hard to imagine two more contrasting artists than Elisabeth Frink and Tracey Emin, the open-air robustness of the one and the deliberately evoked interior squalor of the other. Tracey Emin has built her career on displaying her vulnerability in public, yet is well aware that by doing so she is articulating a spiritual need. She entitled her 1997 solo show ‘I Need Art Like I Need God’. So, it is appropriate, if unsettling, that having entered Liverpool Cathedral under Frink’s Christ, one turns to find one of Emin’s candyfloss neon signs. Entitled For You, it proclaims: ‘I felt you and I knew you loved me.’

To learn to express vulnerability before God is perhaps one of the hardest parts of the spiritual life. There is remarkably little about it in the gospels – apart, of course, from the difficult injunction in the Beatitudes, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’.

Paul is perhaps the best guide, telling the Corinthians about his desperation to be freed from the ‘thorn in his flesh’, but how he eventually understood God’s reason for it: ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).’

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