These angels, warriors and poets who people the stone, are born of sunny, windy hill tops, and the dark light of caves; a kind of ecstasy, a stillness, a remembered energy from childhood, from dreams of fish memory, from dreams of flying and the silence of stone.’
In 2013, Emily Young’s exhibition in Venice, We are Stone’s Children, led Financial Times’ critic Jackie Wullschlager to proclaim her ‘Britain’s greatest living stone sculptor’ with ‘monumental, hieratic, yet strongly individualised heads’. (Jackie Wullschlager, ‘Emily Young, We are Stone’s Children, Fine Art Society, London – review’, Financial Times, 1st September 2013). Emily Young has spent nearly 40 years dedicated to carving figurative stone sculptures, single-mindedly pursuing the challenge of working in this most ancient of materials, based for most of the last decade in a monastery in Tuscany. She was born into a family of distinguished writers, artists and explorers, including her grandmother the sculptor Kathleen Scott, who worked with Auguste Rodin. Brief studies at art colleges in London and New York were superseded by travels through the Americas, Asia, Africa, Europe and Middle East – far more instrumental in her decision to start carving in the early 1980s. Young practices free sculpture, meaning she approaches each block of stone with no preconceived idea of what working upon the stone might reveal, without preparatory drawings or maquettes, but instead permitting the quality of the stone, whether geological, geographical or formal, to dictate the final form.
Her heads are perhaps the most iconic motif of her sculpture, extraordinary faces emerging from hunks of stone, part polished and part unadulterated raw ancient stone.
‘The word angel is derived from the Sanskrit Anjiras, meaning messenger from the gods to man… The looks on the faces of the angels are not planned as such, they arrive and surprise me often with their softness and sadness, and strength and calm. But like all good angels, they have a certain graveness, an objectivity, a touch of the infinite, and a certain compassion.’
The present work is one such ‘angel’ or ‘messenger’, a serene face – quite classical in its nobility – emerging from the centre of the stone, flanked by unpolished, beautifully textured material to either side. Angels are permanently installed at St Paul’s Cathedral Churchyard, London, St Pancras New Church, Euston, and the University of Notre Dame, USA.
A primary concern for Young in her sculpture is a ‘protest’ against the treatment of the earth by human inhabitants, primarily in the West, using ancient materials that ‘tell the story of the Earth’:
‘The heads are the mirrors of my quietness and stillness when I find for a split second a way to reconcile the astonishing power and beauty of the creation with the endless and pointlessly cruel treatment by mankind of the full panoply of his co-habitants on Earth, and the planet itself.’
Using the human face Young reflects the viewer back to themselves, encouraging contemplation, recognition and a meditation on humanity. With this most recognisable and resonant of subjects and the ancient material acting as witness to history, Young speaks to the past and implores a reimagining of our future.