[1][2] Elisabeth Frink was born in November 1930 at her paternal grandparents' home The Grange in Great Thurlow, a village and civil parish in the St Edmundsbury district of Suffolk, England.

Captain Ralph Cuyler Frink, was a career officer in the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards[3] and among the men of the cavalry regiment evacuated from Dunkirk in the early summer of 1940.

[5] Growing up near a military airfield in Suffolk, she heard bombers returning from their missions and on one occasion was forced to hide under a hedge to avoid the machine gun attack of a German fighter plane.

[6] Her early drawings, from the period before she attended arts school in London, have a powerful apocalyptic flavour: themes include wounded birds and falling men.

[8] She was part of a postwar group of British sculptors, dubbed the Geometry of Fear school, that included Reg Butler, Bernard Meadows, Kenneth Armitage and Eduardo Paolozzi.

On returning to England, she focused on the male nude, barrel-chested, with mask-like features, attenuated limbs and a pitted surface, for example Running Man (1976; Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art).

Frink's sculpture, and her lithographs and etchings created as book illustrations, drew on archetypes expressing masculine strength, struggle and aggression.

Tirelessly, Frink continued to accept commissions and sculpt, as well as serve on advisory committees, meet art students who had expressed an interest in her work, and pursue other public commitments.

[9] Stephen Gardiner, Frink's official biographer, argued that this final sculpture was appropriate: "This awesome work, beautiful, clear and commanding, a vivid mirror-image of the artist's mind and spirit, created against fearful odds, was a perfect memorial for a remarkable great individual.

Uniquely in England, Desert Quartet (1990), Frink's penultimate sculpture, was listed at Grade II* in 2007, less than 30 years from its creation by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

[22] Before Frink died in 1993, she had given master classes at the Sir Henry Doulton School of Sculpture then headed by sculptor Colin Melbourne ARA in Stoke-on-Trent, England.

In 1990 she met Harry Everington there and their shared artistic outlook brought about the Frink School of Figurative Sculpture which opened in 1996 in Longton and closed in 2005 at Tunstall.

[26] The others were Dorothy Hodgkin (scientist), Margot Fonteyn (ballerina / choreographer), Marea Hartman (sports administrator) and Daphne Du Maurier (writer).

[30] Frink not only lent these but also was on location for their shooting and coached actor Viveca Lindfors on performing the sculptor's method of building up plaster, which was then ferociously worked and carved.