A recent journey down a particularly long online rabbit hole – the kind of digression at which the internet still sometime excels – led me to a documentary interview, recorded in 1981, between the then UK Conservative Arts Minister Norman St John-Stevas and the sculptor (soon to be Dame) Elisabeth Frink.
The full discussion, all 30 minutes of it, is on YouTube and is well worth a watch, particularly for Frink’s thoughts on her religious commissions for various churches and cathedrals. St John-Stevas was a prominent Catholic on the grandest, campest scale: he kept relics of Blessed Pius IX alongside his signed photographs of Princess Margaret and dressed up in a papal cassock when hosting house parties. Frink on the other hand, brought up in a Catholic family, found faith a thornier issue altogether: “I have very strong views on Catholicism now, on what maybe it does or it doesn’t do with relation to human beings,” she reflects in the interview (to discreet winces from her interviewer).
