Birds formed a central and continuous subject within Frink’s oeuvre, and we can trace the various stages of her career through its evolution of form. Her earliest drawings as a young girl during the Second World War depicted wounded birds and falling men. She grew up in Suffolk near a military base where her father was stationed; witnessing first-hand the officers – their strength and vulnerability – and the damage of warfare shaped her artistic expression. The gift of her psychological perception was to transmit the human condition through her sculpture of animals, and later men.

While still a student at Chelsea School of Art her Bird of 1952 – an aggressive, stalking figure - was acquired by the Tate. The psychological charge resonated concurrently with the work of her male compatriots chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1952, including Lynn Chadwick, Keneth Armitage, Reg Butler and William Turnbull. Their similarly tense bronzes - pitted, spikey and aggressive – led the critic Herbert Fread to coin the term ‘Geometry of Fear’, reflecting what he perceived as the anxieties and fears of the post-War condition.

The Mirage series of which the present bronze belongs developed from Frink’s Harbinger birds (editions held within the Tate), but take on a smoother, softer expression. It emerged directly as a result of Frink’s move to Cévennes, France, in 1967. Frink described how, ‘the theme really came from going to visit the Camargue for quite a long period. In the very hot weather people on horseback or birds – flamingos in the distance – used to assume these strange, talking shapes, floating, broken up by the distance. I was trying to do something which was part bird, part stalking beast, but not entirely either’ (the Artist, quoted in Edward Lucie-Smith and Elisabeth Frink, Frink a Portrait, Bloomsbury, London, 1994, p.123).

The present work has a distinct patination, appearing brighter and more polished, thus evoking a sense of the shimmering heat reflected in its name. Frink took this conceprt further in her final evolution of the Mirage series by utilising polished aluminium. The ambiguous form of this sculpture, while still unfamiliar and thus possessive of a certain unquiet, nevertheless marks a decisive shift from her first sculptures of birds as harbingers of doom. It is a powerful and captivating work. Frink’s ability to cut to the centre of the age-old relationship and express the dialogue between man and animal, avoiding the pitfalls of clichéd stereotypes, is the essence and strength of her sculpture.