Environmentalism and ecology coalesce in Emily Young’s (b.1951) sculptures, and are brought together by her preoccupation with lost historical landscapes, ancient and allegorical narratives, and cross-cultural creation myths which take striking sculptural form. Her work is thus shaped by interlocking and interdependent structures, through which she critically explores notions of embodiment and identity, consciousness and reflective interiority. Young uses what she describes as ‘the most basic of earth’s materials’ to depict her fascination with the relationship between the inherent beauty and tragedy of humanity, and seeks further answers from texts as diverse as anthropology, philosophy, and poetry, archaeology, psychology, geology and astronomy. Young fits into a broader cluster of artists who in successive generations have used carving to distinguish their work from other sculptors, despite which she remains unique within this group. Her predecessors include Henry Moore (1898-1986), Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), and Frank Dobson (1886-1963) but, in contrast, Young looks decisively to former societies and cultures to address current ecological anxieties and developing environmental issues.

In their classical composition and narrative perspective there has perhaps been a difficulty for critics to fit Young’s sculptures into contemporary conceptual modern artistic conventions. Yet in looking to the traditions, architecture, and arts of ancient societies Young restores the historical practice of the pre-war free carvers, Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), Eric Gill (1882-1940), and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915), whose works were themselves cultivated from a revived interest in the non-western ethnographic collections held in the British Museum and in the Victoria and Albert Museum at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, the addition in 2024 of Young’s head, Warrior Poet (2011), to the permanent collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum (in The Dorothy and Michael Hintze Galleries) reflects the unconventional categorisation of her compositions as a modern carver but, crucially, it also integrates and legitimises her body of work into the long history of British sculptors. In common with Gill, Epstein, and Gaudier-Brzeska, Young is classically inspired but engages widely with representations of the human form across land and time, finding examples of figuration in gods and goddesses, warriors, buddhas, soldiers, kings and queens, angels and demons, sinners and saints. There is thus an intrinsic sense of ancestry, continuity, and the expanse of time in Young’s work, all of which are unified under the three main subjects we find in her sculptures: heads, discs and torsos.

Descended from an artistically rich and eclectic lineage, Young’s family offers a long line of artists, writers, and conservationists from whom to draw inspiration. The most prominent members of her family to have had an influence on Young’s work, however, were her half uncle, Peter Scott (1909-1989), and her grandmother, Kathleen Scott (1878-1947). Young’s half uncle was a painter, ornithologist and conservationist. His conservationism began in the 1950s through his involvement in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, and in 1961 he co-founded the World Wildlife Fund. In his capacity as chairman of the WWF, Scott established national appeals, advising on conservation issues, lecturing and fundraising. The WWF continues to this day to be the world’s leading conservation non-profit organisation. Young’s grandmother, on the other hand, was a talented sculptor. Working directly with Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), whose influence can be seen in her early works, she been described as ‘the most significant and prolific British woman sculptor before Barbara Hepworth’. Her grandmother did not always conform to expected conventions, which is a characteristic we see mirrored in Young’s career. According to Mark Stocker, Scott’s work became ‘increasingly stylistically reactionary’, which was considered all the more problematic when viewed alongside her hostility towards the sculptures of Moore, Epstein, and Dobson. The combination of these factors, observes Stocker, contributed to her work having not received the recognition it deserves. Although Young did not have the opportunity to meet her grandmother, it would be naïve to suggest that such heritage did not shape her formative years. In the decades that followed, however, Young established her own artistic identity culminating in her being positioned as ‘one of the world’s most prominent environmental artists’.

Young’s rebellious, progressive and avant-garde outlook is, then, likely a reflection of her bohemian roots, which went on to define her educational and artistic direction. Indeed, the London-born artist has consistently deviated from accepted social, cultural, and artistic conventions. Young embraced the vibrant and intoxicating hedonistic cultures of the 1960s in her youth, socialising with hippies, poets, philosophers and musicians – in whose company she is said to have inspired Sid Barrett to write Pink Floyd’s early piece of psychedelia, ‘See Emily Play’ in 1967. She also recollects in a recent BBC Sounds interview that her time in formal education was one of artistic and creative confinement. Young attended Chelsea School of Art, albeit briefly, finding the work being produced in London and New York to be ‘trivial’, centred as it was during the 1960s on geometric abstractions, minimalism, and conceptualism. Figuration at this point was, in contrast, considered old fashioned; and was a stark rejection Young remembers as bewildering – ‘it was dead, there was a death there’ she laments. Her academic ventures continued to be fleeting, with Young spending a short time in the early 1970s at Stony Brook University, New York, and at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London during the 1980s. Nevertheless, these decades provided her with opportunities to meet several notable contemporary artists, including Ken Kiff (1935-2001), John Latham (1921-2006), and Barbara Steveni (1928-2020), whose works, support, and informal guidance left an indelible mark on her own artistic development from painter to sculptor in subsequent years. The inspiration Young continued to seek, though, remained firmly in the past before the dawn of Modernism, and from cultures as diverse as those she experienced whilst travelling across countries such as India, Afghanistan and Persia (modern-day Iran), Turkey, Greece, and the Buddhist nations of southern Asia, as well as in the mountain ranges of the Hindu Kush.

Unsurprisingly, much has been made of the links between Young and Hepworth, who in their role as modern female carvers have stood out in a field that has otherwise tended to be dominated by men. This comparison has been described as ‘lazy’ by Mark. C. O'Flaherty, who suggests it centres solely on their shared sex and little else. Yet such an oversimplification fails to take into account the significance of Hepworth’s and Young’s place within successive generations of British female sculptors, whose collective body of work has helped reposition women into the frame of art history. Their sculptures have transformed and challenged the art world in equal measure, with their retrospective inclusion in modern histories of art serving as testament to the influence of Linda Nochlin’s 1971 feminist essay, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, which sought to dismantle traditional methodologies, historical institutional and educational constraints, and male-ordered narratives within the artistic canon. Whilst Nochlin did not consider sculptors in her essay, her analysis not only reinvigorated, but revolutionised, the debate on canon formation within which there was a conspicuous absence of women artists deemed as ‘great’. According to Nochlin the ‘white Western male viewpoint, unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian, may – and does – prove to be inadequate, not merely on moral and ethical grounds, or because it is elitist, but on purely intellectual ones’. Despite the heady optimism and political energy of the 1970s, there remained for a time a distinct lack of female representation in modern histories of art. In fact, according to Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, women were ‘more thoroughly rubbed out of the pages of art’s histories’ in consequence of their new-found freedoms in the wake of World War I, which included increasing emancipation, heightened social activity, public and professional visibility. There is no doubt that Young can be firmly located within this framework of influential revisionist history, and yet it is also her departure from established genres of modern art – those originally formed in the fervour of the 1960s Modern Art Movement – that have positioned her as a relative outsider in the contemporary art scene. Thus in common with the trajectory of her grandmother before her, Young has spent much of her career on the periphery forging her own individual path, driven not by the dictates of traditional art circles but by her creative and expressive sculptural imagination.

The backdrop to Young’s work as a sculptor and writer is her home in a semi-restored seventeenth-century monastery, the Convento di Santa Croce, in southern Tuscany, which serves as the base for her environmental activism. In common with the stones she carves, this once religious site holds multiple layers of colourful interwoven historical and sociocultural narratives, connected as they are to the geological and archaeological landscape in which it proudly sits. Young recognises the monastery as having been designed as a ‘sacred space; a place where all sorts of people come and find solace’. As its current custodian, then, she is deeply conscious of her role in the monastery’s continuing evolution and history. The tallest inactive volcano on the Italian peninsula, Monte Amiata, occupies a view from the monastery, as does the verdant land on which the surrounding topography has thrived in its mineral-rich volcanic soil. At the most rudimentary level, maintains Richard Fortey, sedimentary rock ‘acts as a memory for our planet [and its place in the solar system]; it is both chronometer and archive’. The diversity of these landscapes are thus permanent reminders of the symbiotic relationship that exists in planetary volatility, and in which Young’s sculptures and environmental work are anchored.

Underpinning much of her environmentalism is the principle that to source from the earth, is to give back to the earth. ‘I put a little modern consciousness back onto nature’ she affirms. Evidence of Young’s environmental values are not confined to her public art, and are demonstrated in her contribution to a major ongoing project to protect the bay at Talamone in Tuscany from harmful fishing practices. In response to an appeal from a local fisherman, Paulo Fanciulli, three twelve tonne marble heads were lowered in 2015 eight meters down onto the sea bed to help snag the nets of illegal trawlers. This underwater city now resembles an ancient submerged civilisation, with over fifty various totems and monoliths provided by various artists in their efforts to restore vegetation and marine life. Over the course of just a few short years Young’s ‘Guardians’, and the other sculptures with which they rest, have been reclaimed by the sea, creating their own ecosystem and a flourishing nutrient-rich habitat of biodiversity.

Young’s choice of stone with its contrasting and often fragmentary layers, gives her sculptures what Jon Wood defines as a ‘double life as a material entity’. Her stone, attests Wood, represents ‘objecthood and finality at the same time as it combats such ideas, suggesting a life beyond the material limits of the block and a deeper, wider interconnectedness’. This interconnectedness nods once more to Young’s environmental motivations as much as to the sites from which she sources her stones, which includes Italy, the United Kingdom, Morocco and Afghanistan. Her environmentalism is, in fact, the key to understanding Young’s choice of material as she seeks to explore humanity’s relationship to the planet, viewing us as increasingly predatory in how we have historically exploited the earth’s natural resources. Thus her sculptures are carved from, for example, onyx, pyroclastic rock, Purbeck blue marble, jasper, speleothem stone, malachite, lapis, quartz and alabaster, with every piece composed unique. Deep within these stones lies an extensive geological record, through which Young quietly dismantles the narratives of traditional creation myths and in so doing enriches our understanding of the Earth’s history and our place within it. Speaking about her process, Young observes that ‘I will have had a relationship already when I first met it [the stone], in a quarry or in a hillside, and so I will already have seen something in it that I think has got a quality that I’m responding to – of beauty, of grace, a kind of communicative element between nature’s design of the stone and its history and how I’m reading into it’. The harsh physicality of Young’s chosen rough-hewn stones are thus beautifully tempered by her acknowledgement of their elemental monumentality, and their capacity to instil in the viewer something profoundly moving.

In their classical composition Young’s heads, especially, are suggestive of material artifacts, sitting resolutely as witnesses from a bygone age. They are located in a familiar form which, whilst seemingly distant, is embedded in our shared past. They appear as if objects removed from time and place, echoing former histories of humanity when images and three-dimensional forms took precedence over text and were understood through a culturally recognised material language enriched by human-object encounters. Indeed, as Joseph Campbell’s hugely influential book, The Mythic Image, underscores, sculptures have communicated and enriched, advanced but also confined countless social and political, spiritual, religious and philosophical belief systems across history and cultures. Campbell’s book played a significant role in Young’s formative years as a sculptor as did the works of the late art critic Peter Fuller, to whom she acknowledged her debt when she recalled recently that ‘I owe him a huge amount, in terms of thinking about art, its functions and origins, and finding the way through. His was a voice in the wilderness for me’. In her pursuit to explore humanity and support the physical environment in which we live, her work transcends temporal, spatial, and geographical boundaries and expresses an artistic freedom rarely seen in modern art circles. Moreover, Young’s work resists what the historian Ludmilla Jordanova describes as ‘the constellation of issues’ and processes that underpin notions of periodisation, those that traditionally furnish historians with the ‘characteristic qualities and possible modes of explanation’ associated with a particular era. Yet it is precisely this ambiguity which enables Young to comment so eloquently through her sculptures on the continuous environmental and ecological issues facing our planet.

Working with the medium of stone binds Young’s work to past traditions of carving, with the thread of its prehistoric roots permeating her sculptures. Whilst her pieces are contemporary in composition their material is, therefore, very much rooted in ancient history and cultures of human experience. ‘Stone carving seems to me to be quite special because it’s so old. Three and a half million years ago the first of our ancestors were using stone tools’, Young observes. Thus there exists a relationship between the ancient and the organic that is preserved in the process of carving stone, in which an archive of diverse human histoires are held within its multilayered forms across countless generations. Each discarded stone she carves offers a different voice from the past, according to Young, ‘because each piece of stone has its own tone, its own ring’. She hears the chipping away with her tools as a type of rhythmic sound, something akin to the ‘origin of music’ – composed as they are through ‘different notes’ that resonate and vibrate from the stone. The choice of medium with which Young is now associated was a gradual conceptual process, moving from painting to carving over the course of two decades. Although she had experimented with free carving in the 1980s, it was not until the 1990s that Young adopted this method in full. Stone carving was once considered the ‘talisman of being modern for sculptors’, notes Benedict Read in his reassessment of the classic account Carving Mountains. As its point of reference Carving Mountains discussed all the major figures in the history of British sculpture from the first part of the twentieth century, including Dobson, Epstein, Gill, Hepworth and Moore for instance. But, as Read points out, the carvers in this period were ‘rediscovering’ the techniques associated with carving, not revolutionising them. Read’s commentary serves not as a criticism but as a reminder of the inherent physicality and history of direct carving that Young’s work explicitly speaks to, within which her relationship to the stone is paramount.

In each form Young’s sculptures take their materiality resonates with and arrests the viewer, attesting to the agency of them not only as works of art but also as geological artifacts. Her heads have a timeless quality in their temporal ambiguity, a commonality we see in the lunar and solar discs as they represent the creation of the universe, its complex history and unknown future. Similarly, in their feminine form her torsos are the embodiment of Mother Earth, a trope that has spanned creation myths across civilisations, religions, and cultures since time began. Although often varied in name and narrative her symbolic presence represents the joining of matter out of chaos, and addresses fundamental questions about humans and their relationship to the Earth. In their physicality Young’s torsos also occupy the space in which the fluid boundaries between sensuality, athleticism and eroticism coexist. Professor of English Literature, Crystal Lake reminds us that artifacts and their history offer often fragmentary traces of the past, but can be understood in terms of their capacity to speak and give evidence. They exist in a ‘state of flux’, maintains Lake, but their ‘dynamic materiality allows them to be plotted simultaneously in various temporal moments’. Young’s sculptures share the characteristics of artifacts as defined by Lake, but through them we also find whispers of immortality in their geological materiality. Their timelessness is suggested further by Young’s collective term ‘angel’ to categorise her sculptures, which takes inspiration from understandings across Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin as a ‘messenger from the heavens to man’. In their traditional guise, angels are the embodiment, for Young, of ‘our best aspirations, our humanity and mindfulness’ serving as ‘imaginary guides’ that ‘inhabit our dreams’. Combining the traditional spiritual meaning of angel with a pragmatic sensibility, Young applies the term also to the geological record and views the stones from which she carves her sculptures as examples of what ‘can reasonably be described as a messenger from the past and the heavens [because] all that we are came from there’. As artifacts Young’s sculptures can be awarded a type of non-human agency that was first outlined in Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, in that they serve as vessels of reciprocity in the ‘reflexive, symbolic domain of social relations’. In their sculptural materiality they not only communicate the Earth’s history they render it readable, and challenge us to reassess our current relationship and entangled pasts.

Heralded as ‘Britain’s greatest living stone sculptor’, Young has unwittingly been tasked with carrying a mantle first awarded to Hepworth, Moore, and Epstein and yet this association undermines Young’s individual contribution to the history of British stone carvers. There is a harmony in the relationship between carvers and their stone, a calmness captured for Young, especially, in the depiction of a human face – ‘one person looks at a piece of stone that has been given a human face and then they will feel the stillness and the ancientness of the stone’. It is from this artistic perspective that Young’s sculptures have been defined as ‘modernist to the core in humanist impulse’, reconciling ‘time, nature, and memory with man’s relationship to the Earth’. Sculptors of natural stone occupy a unique place, suggests Fortey, as they mediate between the human and geological realms, reinterpreting the inconceivably slow erosion of the Earth as a metaphor for our own collective mortality. Young’s sculptures could, therefore, serve as sombre memorials to the planet’s formation and continuous evolution, as they capture the cycles of erosion and turbulence, shifting tectonic plates, and volatile climactic conditions that the Earth’s volcanic past bears witness to. Yet there is also an urgency to Young’s work in that she employs the materiality of the stone to stimulate further discussions around current environmental and ecological issues. ‘Stone is our earthly ancestor, and we are its children’, asserts Young, suggesting that within this relationship there too lies a deeply ingrained sense of ancestry, endurance and preservation where one element is inseparable from the other.

Young’s work is exhibited in permanent installations and public collections worldwide. These include, Anglo American, London; Cloister of Madonna dell’Orto, Venice; La Défense, Paris; Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA), Chicago; Loyola University, Rome; Neo Bankside, London; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; Paternoster Square, St Paul’s Cathedral, London; Salisbury Cathedral, Sailsbury; Standard Life, Edinburgh; St James’ Church, Piccadilly, London; St Pancras Church, London; The David Robert’s Art Foundation, London; The Imperial War Museum, London; The National Bank of Luxembourg, Luxembourg; The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester; University of Notre Dame, Chicago; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

In collaboration with the European Cultural Centre, Young was invited to exhibit six works during the 2024 Venice Biennale and includes Heart Head Stone I (2023).

Essay by Dr Helen Metcalfe