The Absent Angels

In 1961 Elisabeth Frink (1930-1993) the Sussex born artist was commissioned by the Lurgan architects Houston & Beaumont and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to create a sculpture in Shaftesbury Square, Belfast on the side of an Ulster Bank branch. It was installed three years later. Whilst formally unnamed they have been variously referred to as “Flying Figures” (is that a pun on the business behind the wall?) or “Airborne Men”, but being on the side of a bank in Belfast they were immediately christened “Draft and Overdraft” by local wags. But the bank branch, like most others, has long-since closed and the Ulster Bank sold the building in 2009, then taking back a lease of the whole building and retaining ownership of the sculptures to help protect and preserve them. But nearly a year ago they were taken down, because the Ulster Bank had formally gifted the sculpture to the nearby Ulster Museum with a view to them going on prominent display there after conservation.

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

These "angels" loomed large in my childhood memories, 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. I started 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 didn't get it finished in time. I 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... There is no sign of their re-emergence from the Ulster Museum conservation catacombs any time soon, but this week I saw that Linen Quarter were priming the former site of this iconic sculpture for a new mural as part of this year's Hit the North street art festival and their "Great Expectations" redevelopment priming scheme for Great Victoria Street. I don't know the mural will be like, although I do hope there will be at least a nod to the previous incumbents of the space, [UPDATE: Mural was completed last Sunday and consists some sort of mutant fish... but no ugly angels in sight] but in the meantime I thought I would share this:

The nameless ugly angels
have finally flown away,
abandoning their posts
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 now their time
has come to an end.

Like other sacred figures
they have been removed
from the public square;
Not to be confined
to a religious reserve
but a secular cathedral.

Aluminium seraphim 
battered by their incarnation.
Bog bodies in reverse.

Or Daedalus and his wingless
offspring scarred by the sun,
brought to down to earth,

Two nameless figures -
Two political identities -

with fixed trajectories,
orange and green,

bound never to meet.
Their day is done.

Selah