Emily Young is acclaimed as “Britain’s greatest living stone sculptor.”
Financial Times
“Her sculptures meditate on time, nature, memory: humankind’s relationship to the Earth.”
“Young brings the human project of meaning into conjunction with geological time.”
R Trew
Bio
Emily Young was born in London into a family of writers, artists, politicians, naturalists and explorers.
As a young woman, she worked primarily as a painter, studying briefly at Chelsea School of Art, Central St 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 stone, preferring to use discarded materials from abandoned quarries.
“In their formal simplicity and directness, and their overt celebration of the marble itself from which they are carved, relishing the geological faults, veins and splits exposed in the working as much as in the finished polished surfaces, they are as abstract as anything by Moore or Hepworth.”
Financial Times
“Emily Young has inherited the mantle as Britain’s greatest female stone sculptor from Dame Barbara Hepworth.”
Telegraph
“Emily Young is remarkable in that she now stands quite alone in her field, not just as the pre-eminent stone-carver of her generation, but as virtually the only sculptor of her kind at all, a true carver working with figurative imagery, of any real and sustained distinction.”
Financial Times
“Emily Young has emerged as one of our most remarkable sculptors – not least because she is a stone carver. I’d give her the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, now and for good.”
William Packer, Financial Times
Emily Young,
environmental artist
The primary objective of her sculpture brings the relationship of humankind and the planet into closer conjunction.
The natural beauty, history and energy of material stone, including its capacity to embody human consciousness, can endure into the future of a vast unknowable universe.
The sculptures have unique characteristics due to each individual stone’s geological history.
Her approach invites the viewer to comprehend a commonality across deep time, geography and cultures. The major preoccupation is humankind’s troubled relationship with the planet. The use of traditional carving skills allied with technology where necessary, allows her to produce timeless works which marry the contemporary with the ancient. The work manifests a unique, serious and poetic presence.
Young’s work is in important public and private collections throughout the world.
Emily Young has studios in Italy and Dorset, with a new showroom in London.
Past exhibitions
Artemis, London
Berkeley Square, London
Cloister of Madonna Dell’Orto, Venice
Crypt, St Pancras New Church, London
David Robert’s Art Foundation, London
Garden Gallery, Wiltshire
Imperial War Museum, London
Kew Gardens, Richmond, London
La Défense, Paris
Leighton House Museum, London
Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago
Loyola University, Rome
Meijer Sculpture Gardens, Grand Rapids
Museo Tartuca, Siena
Neo Bankside, South Bank, London
Norwich Castle
Oxford New College, Oxford
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
Paternoster Square, St Paul’s Cathedral, London
Paul Getty Foundation, California
Salisbury Cathedral, Wiltshire
Sheffield Millenium Gallery, Sheffield
St Pancras Church, London
The Space, Hong Kong
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester