(Continued)
From 1967 to 73 Frink lived in a collection of farm buildings, 'Le Village', in the commune of Corbès, Gard, near the foothills of the Cévennes where, by coincidence, a fifteenth-century château at Montuzorgues had belonged to a Huguenot ancestor of her mother, Léonard Rebotier. (Ralph and Jean Frink bought a house near Uzès, about thirty miles from 'Le Village', in 1971 and lived there and at Cuylers till Ralph died, in 1974.) The area was full of refugees seeking asylum from the Algerian war. Frink had been much aVected, as always, by the cruelty of the war, the slaying or 'disappearing' of the innocent ­ including Ben Barka, the Algerian Liberation leader. The turmoil, the sorrow, the blood, the deaths, were attributable to the greed of politicians and generals for power. In particular, Frink saw a photograph in a newspaper of General Oufkir, the Moroccan Minister of the Interior, in dark glasses. Frink's warriors, who had heroic aspects, now became monstrous heads blinded by goggles: 'I always find it rather sinister when you can't see people's eyes', she said. She developed this image in the seventies into Tribute Heads, dedicated to people being tortured or dying for their beliefs.

Another development in her work may be traced to this period in France. The artist could drive to the Camargue in about an hour. Here, her predatory wingless bird of the early sixties became the Mirage Bird (flamingo, egret). Frink described how, in observing waders on the marshlands at a distance, the body, the wings, of the bird seemed to disappear in the heat haze and only beak and immense thin legs remained ­ but then the maleness of the bird was in its beak and legs.

From 1978 Elisabeth Frink made her home in Woolland, Dorset. She had married for the third time, Count Alexander Csáky, an insurance broker and businessman, who took an interest in the exhibiting and sales areas of her work, until his death in 1993.

In addition to her sculpture, Frink worked on tapestries, and lithographs, and loved illustrating books, notably Aesop's Fables (1968), The Canterbury Tales (1972) and The Odyssey and The Iliad (1974­5) for The Folio Society.

She never stopped taking risks in her work: indeed, her experiments in applying colour to bronzes are thought to have caused the oesophageal cancer from which she died, on 18 April 1993. She never stopped developing her art: during her illness she was given a book written by William Anderson, which inspired her to start work on The Green Man, a symbol of regeneration; and she also planned to complete another piece on humans' relationship with animals, from whom she felt we had a lot to learn.

* I am indebted to Iris Eley and Stephen and Margaret Ryder for information in this article; and to Dora Rowlinson for loaning the investiture photograph as well as for recalling her memories of the Frinks.