I was delighted to see that around three years after their removal from the former Ulster Bank building at Shaftesbury Square, Belfast, Elisabeth Frink's iconic statues have found a new home on the outside of the Ulster Museum extension in Botanic Park. Just a pity they hadn't appeared a couple of weeks ago or they would undoubtedly have featured in the treasure hunt I devised for my wife Sally's significant birthday...
I previously wrote a piece about their unannounced removal, but given that I am currently planning to compile another collection of my scribblings during my upcoming sabbatical, this one a series of pieces with a specific sense of place here in Belfast, I thought I should revise both the poem and attendant blog to take account of their reappearance.
As I previously wrote, Elisabeth Frink (1930-1993), a Sussex born artist was commissioned in 1961 by the Lurgan architects Houston & Beaumont and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to create a sculpture specifically for the side of the new Ulster Bank branch overlooking Shaftesbury Square, Belfast. It was installed three years later. They were formally unnamed but have been variously referred to as “Airborne Men”, or “Flying Figures” perhaps as a pun on the business going on behind the wall, but were immediately christened “Draft and Overdraft” by local wags. The late Belfast poet Ciaran Carson wrote in 2016
“it is now an essential piece of the urban fabric… For me, it is among the finest public sculptures in the city – and there are precious few of those. It is redolent with ambiguity…”
Ciaran Carson, Belfast Poet Irish Times 2015
But by then the bank branch, like most others, had long-since closed, with the Ulster Bank selling the building in 2009. However they took back a lease of the whole building and retained ownership of the sculptures to help protect and preserve them, until they were gifted to the Ulster Museum with a view to them going on prominent display there after conservation.
As Carson wrote, Belfast historically had few pieces of public art and I suppose because of that these "angels" loomed large in my childhood memories of the city, even though I probably only saw them once a year as I returned from "the field" on the Twelfth as a "stringboy" with an Orange lodge. It was with those memories that I started to write this piece during the second covid-19 lockdown when Jim Deeds and I were devising our lockdown Wonderful Wander through south Belfast for 4 Corners 2021, but I didn't get it finished in time. I then returned to it, changing the focus when I first saw the news of their removal, but again didn't get it finished in due time, and finally published a previous version when the Linen Quarter BID installed a new mural as part of the Hit the North street art festival and their much needed "Great Expectations" redevelopment scheme for Great Victoria Street. So now that Frink's freaky figures have found their new resting place, here is what I think will be the final version of this poem...
(Picture credit to Danny Meegan)
have finally flitted
on their invisible wings,
coming to roost
on another suitably
brutalist carbuncle.
brutalist carbuncle.
They have abandoned
their long held posts
perched awkwardly
at the gateway to
a once gilded mile
that has lost its shine.
For decades they watched
the changing traffic flow
and the fluctuating fortunes
of the square below,
through many different
forms of troubles.
Two eternal guardians
forever frozen at
twenty-five past three,
give or take a minute.
But at last their time
a once gilded mile
that has lost its shine.
For decades they watched
the changing traffic flow
and the fluctuating fortunes
of the square below,
through many different
forms of troubles.
Two eternal guardians
forever frozen at
twenty-five past three,
give or take a minute.
But at last their time
there came to an end.
Aluminium seraphim
battered by their incarnation.
Bog bodies in reverse.
Or Daedalus and his wingless
offspring scarred by the sun,
brought down to earth,
Two nameless figures -
Two political identities -
offspring scarred by the sun,
brought down to earth,
Two nameless figures -
Two political identities -
with fixed trajectories,
orange and green,
orange and green,
bound never to meet.
Their day in the sun done.
Their day in the sun done.
Like other sacred figures
they have been removed
from the public square;
Not to be confined
to a religious reserve
but a secular cathedral,
they have been removed
from the public square;
Not to be confined
to a religious reserve
but a secular cathedral,
In leafy seclusion
to be duly noted
by those of a certain
academic inclination, but
no longer intruding on
the everyday.
Selah
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