Helios

'The loveliness, power and strength in the stone is the raw beauty of nature herself; I can put a more or less familiar shape onto it, like a suit of clothes, and then eyes can look in and see what has been there for millions or billions of years'
- Emily Young

Emily Young’s passion for sculpture was first sparked by a serendipitous encounter with a piece of discarded marble at her home, an offcut leftover from a kitchen countertop, and a stray set of masonry tools left behind by a friend. Intrigued by the creative potential of the material, she began to explore its profile with the forgotten tools, carving into its surface in search of an unknown form. Drawn to the painstaking precision and intense physicality demanded by the technique, Young found herself completely absorbed by this incredibly meditative process of creation. Though she had been working in painting and drawing for a number of years, this discovery of direct carving was a revelation, opening up her practice to a completely new area of expression.

At the heart of Young’s practice lies a deep connection to the materials she uses, a devotion to the variety of natural textures, colours and patterns that she discovers within the stones as she works away at their surfaces. Her selection process is driven by instinct – some pieces are salvaged from the hills around her home in the Italian countryside, others discovered discarded at the back of a quarry, but each piece of rock and stone is chosen because the artist detects an intangible sense of potential in it. ‘I’m a bit of a scavenger,’ she explains, ‘I like searching among old rocks and sometimes, somehow, to make a relationship with one’ (E. Young, quoted in ‘Conversations with Stone: Emily Young talks to Simon Martin, Artistic Director of Pallant House Gallery,’ in Emily Young: Call & Response, Venice, London, 2015, p. 9). Though she now lives and works in a land renowned for the quality of its flawless white Carrara marble, Young instead finds herself drawn to intensely variegated stones, often preferring to visit defunct quarries where she can salvage discarded offcuts that others believe unsuitable. As a result, her sculptures appear in materials as diverse as alabaster, Irish marble, malachite, onyx and lapis lazuli, sourced from an extensive array of countries around the world.

Deftly attuned to the individual characteristics of each stone she works in, Young cuts directly into the material herself, without any preparatory studies or drawings. In this way, she believes she is communicating with the stone, feeling her way organically towards an image or a form as she peels away layer after layer of material, responding to its internal structure as it slowly reveals itself to her. Comparing this process to a conversation, the artist continuously adapts her carving to what she discovers as she works, altering the sculpture to accommodate hidden cavities or previously unseen streams of pigment that signal the chemical make-up of the stone and its journey through time. As she explains: ‘The stone will have an effect on me, on how I work with it … It’s not a question of me saying, “You will be what I want you to be”, but rather, “What do you bring, stone, and what can I bring to that?” I want to make it beautiful…’ (E. Young, quoted in ibid, pp. 12-13).

Fascinated by the heritage of these stones, their almost unfathomable age and the ancient processes that shaped and created them, Young often leaves whole sections of their surfaces unworked, restraining herself from altering the natural beauty she finds. Instead she relishes the individual quirks and features, sinuous ripples and pockets of colour that reveal themselves underneath her tools, each mark highlighting the millions of years and long forgotten geological events that have led them to reach their current configuration. In this way, she draws our attention to the evolution of the stone, each feature tracing the endless cycle of seismic events and atmospheric weathering that have shaped this specific piece of rock. Explaining this approach in her work, Young has said: ‘There is a story told in every piece of stone that is more magnificent than any creation myth, so when I carve into the stone I’m imposing my own tiny moment on it, I put a little modern consciousness back into nature,’ (E. Young, quoted in E. Tobin, ‘Sculptor Emily Young’s Tuscan Monastery,’ https://www.housandgarden.co.uk/gallery/emily-young, accessed 20 July 2018, 10.12 am).

This acute awareness of the vast history that lies behind her materials has simultaneously caused the artist to consider the potential futures that lie ahead for her sculptures – just as these beautiful rocks and stones have survived millennia to reach her, so too may they live for several thousand more. As a result, Young strives for a timelessness in her choice of subject matter, seeking forms that appear to stand outside of any particular time or culture, so that if someone may encounter her work in two thousand, or even two million years’ time, they would appreciate the image and still be able to enjoy a connection to it. In response to this search for the unknowable future, Young looks towards the monuments of the past for inspiration, to the sculptures of ancient Greece and Rome and the centuries-old representations of Buddha in South East Asia, in search of a universal language that can transcend the moment of an artwork’s creation and speak to generations across time.

As a result, the forms that typically emerge from Young’s explorations into these enigmatic rocks take inspiration from the human body. Serene faces dominate her oeuvre, their idealised features reduced to an almost androgynous simplicity. This, combined with their calm demeanour and captivating sense of stillness, imbues the figures with an otherworldly quality, as if they may represent some ancient hieratic being, worshipped for centuries but whose name is now lost to us. Others appear as elegantly curvaceous columns, their twisting, almost abstract forms echoing the taut lines of a female torso, while a select few look to the elemental forces of the natural world – the sun and the moon, for example – which frame our experience of life on earth. The result is a beautifully lyrical aesthetic, at once ancient and modern, reflective and forward-thinking, through which Young can explore the fundamental link between humanity, history and the earth, and all of the possible futures which lie ahead of us.

We are very grateful to Emily Young for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.