First shown at the Venice Biennale in 2013, ‘Lost Mountain Head I’ was part of Emily’s solo show ‘We Are Stone’s Children’ in the cloister of the Madonna del ‘Orto.

‘Lost Mountain Head I’ has remained part of Emily’s Artist’s collection, and has been shown at international and UK venues including Berkeley Square, Christies and Bankside (next to the Tate Modern). It returned to the Venice Biennale last year, along with five other works, where Emily’s show won the European Cultural Centre’s ‘Sculpture and Installation’ prize.

As Emily’s solo show ‘Comparative Stillness’ closes at The Richard Green Gallery, New Bond St. London, ‘Lost Mountain Head I’ comes to the forecourt of Bridport Arts Centre in Dorset for the summer months of 2025. The sculpture is carved from pyroclastic stone, quarried from a mountainous area in southern Italy, just one of the many stone types carved by the artist. Emily regularly carves Dorset stone, sourcing material from Portland and the Purbecks.

Bridport is the home of Emily’s UK workshop and private gallery, with most of the studio team being residents of the town. Many excellent local businesses and skilled individuals work with the Bridport team and so it is with some celebration that ‘Lost Mountain Head I’ becomes part of the town this summer.

“Clastic rocks are composed of fragments – or clasts – of pre-existing rock. They are the complex product of massive volcanic explosions where old sedimentary stone is blasted to pieces of varying sizes. These are then formed into new stone aggregates with a matrix of ash.

The first impression on seeing this sculpture will probably be that this piece of stone is ancient and showing its’ age. It is a block of volcanic stone, blown apart and then compacted in a great explosion hundreds of thousands of years ago. It is a mix of onyx, travertine, and brecchia, ridiculously complex, found in an old quarry on the side of a huge and dormant volcano, Monte Amiata, in central Italy.

Some areas are pitted with dark and fluted holes; some show blocks of shattered and fragmented segments of rock set in a matrix of ash or mud, some show cloud-like, flowering figurations, striped in whirling colours of honey, cream, grey, white and treacle, formed in water.

The textures are varied: dense, fractured, crystalline, smooth; each one was formed in the mountain, and subjected to the elements, taking many hundreds of millennia to become what we see today.

Large parts of the surface are left raw and untouched, showing the magical effects of wind and rain, dust and ice, plant and animal life: nature has made its mark on the stone.

The worked and polished surfaces that I have then carved into the old stone carries some of my human reflections – that we are born of nature, of rocks and fire and water, in a universe, a vastness of space and time that is inconceivable to us; that the earth is tiny, unspeakably complex, beautiful and rare.

It is the look of those reflections, an image of my consciousness of that process and an awareness of what we humans are now and what we think and feel that is then locked into the wild mountain stone. This look will stay as the pieces endure and pass into the unknowable future, the strangest of all places.”

Emily Young,

Bridport Arts Centre (BAC) is a multi-art venue at the heart of Bridport delivering an annual programme of live performance, visual arts exhibitions, workshops, cultural networks and community arts projects. Deeply connected to place, BAC supports local creatives and shares the stories of the people that give the town and the wider West Dorset region its unique cultural character.

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