EMILY YOUNG FRSS
Born London 1951
Ref: CL 3777
River Torso IV
Macauba Quartzite: 13 ⅜ x 4 x 1 ½ in / 34 x 10 x 4 cm
Age: over a billion years
Source: Brazil
Carved in 2021
Geology notes:
This stone is a fine blue and white quartzite, with very occasional and surprising spots of dark red.
It was formed many hundreds of millions of years ago, in what is now Brazil. Its blue and white
figurations remind me strongly of water. It's extremely robust. Huge deposits of sand have been deformed into very hard quartzites inside a large and extensive basin in the Brazilian state of Bahia ...’
‘Britain’s greatest living stone sculptor’ Financial Times
Emily Young was born in London in 1951 into a family which included writers, artists, politicians, naturalists and explorers. Her grandmother was the sculptor Kathleen Scott, a colleague of Auguste Rodin, and her uncle Peter Scott, started the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in 1961. As a young woman, she worked primarily as a painter, studying briefly at Chelsea School of Art and Central Saint Martins in London, and Stonybrook University, New York. She left London in the late 60s, and spent the next years travelling widely, studying art and culture. In the early 1980s she started carving in stone, preferring to use discarded materials from abandoned quarries. The primary objective of her sculpture is to bring humankind and the living planet into a consciously closer conjunction. Our relationship has been clouded over time by millennia of fantasies about the nature of power and human privilege over nature. To experience the natural beauty, geological history and subtle energy of stone, including its unique capacity to embody human creativity over long periods, is a part of the changing story of human consciousness, and the understanding of our nature, in time and space. We can imagine our history both backwards to the creation of our universe and forwards into the future of a vast, unknowable universe.
Her approach allows the viewer to comprehend a commonality across centuries, geography and cultures. Her preoccupation is our troubled relationship with the planet. In her combination of traditional carving skills allied with technology where necessary, she produces timeless works which marry the contemporary with the ancient, manifesting a unique, serious and poetic presence. They are, each one, a call to thoughtfulness, looking to the future. She has exhibited at many prestigious museums including: The Getty, California; The Imperial War Museum, London; The Whitworth, Manchester; The Meijer Sculpture Gardens, Grand Rapids, and in 2018, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Emily Young’s work is in public and private collections throughout the world. She currently divides her time between studios in the UK and Italy.
Solo exhibitions
2024
60th Venice Biennale
2023
Pareidolia in Stone, Richard Green, London
Willoughby Gerrish / Thirsk Hall Sculpture Garden, Thirsk, North Yorkshire
2021
Carving in Time, Willoughby Gerrish in Association with Tomasso Gallery, London
2019/20
Bowman Sculpture, London
2019
Museo della Tartuca, Siena
2018
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
2018
New College, Oxford
2017
Victoria Beckham / Emily Young, Dover Street, London
2017/18
Bowman Sculpture, London
2017
St James’s Church, Piccadilly
2016
Bowman Sculpture, London
2015
Call & Response, Cloister of Madonna Dell’Orto, Venice, coinciding with the 56th Venice Biennale
Stone From the Mountain, The Fine Art Society, Edinburgh
2014
Cassandra / Earth II, Berkeley Square, London
Emily Young: Four Heads, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
2013
We are Stone’s Children, Cloister of Madonna Dell’Orto, Venice, coinciding with the 55th Venice Biennale
2012
Lithica, Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh
The Metaphysics of Stone, Berkeley Square
2011
Emily Young at Neo Bankside, South Bank, London
The Maremma Heads, The Fine Art Society, London
2010
Microcosms, Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh
2009
Angels and Archangels, Salisbury Cathedral, Salisbury
Teardrop, The Fine Art Society, London
2008
Singing Stone, Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh
2007
The Fine Art Society, London
2006
The Crypt, St Pancras Church, London
2005
The Fine Art Society, London
2004
The Crypt, St Pancras Church, London
2003
Kew Gardens, Richmond, London
2002
Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh
2001
Leighton House Museum, London
1999
Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh
1997
Recent Stone Carvings, The Fine Art Society, London
Selected Group Exhibitions
2019
Frieze Sculpture Park, London
2017
Frieze Sculpture Park, London
2017
Rodin and the Contemporary Figuration Tradition, The Meijer Sculpture Gardens, Grand Rapids
2016
Beyond Limits, Sotheby’s at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire
2015
The Violet Crab, David Robert’s Art Foundation, London
2013
Carving in Britain since 1910, The Fine Art Society, London
Messerschmidt and Modernity, The J. Paul Getty Foundation, California
2012
The British Cut, The Space, Hong Kong
2011
The Figure in the Landscape, The Garden Gallery, Wiltshire
2007
Art at the Rockface, Norwich Castle and Sheffield Millennium Galleries
Public and private collections of note:
Artemis, London
The Crypt, St Pancras New Church, London
David Robert’s Art Foundation, London
Imperial War Museum, London
Neo Bankside, South Bank, London
Paternoster Square, St Paul’s Cathedral, London
The Whitworth, University of Manchester
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
La Défense, Paris
Loyola University, Rome
Cloister of Madonna Dell’Orto, Venice
Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago
