Emily Young: Carving in Time | 13 October - 12 November 2021

A curated exhibition of works by Emily Young alongside sculpture from the Classical to the Neoclassical, presented by Tomasso and Willoughby Gerrish.

In centuries or millennia to come, who will still live on Earth? Who will look back at us and read signs of our lives and civilisations? What will they see? What will they, or it, understand of us? Stones carved in this contemporary world have a good chance of enduring into unknowable futures, where, like the stone carvings and buildings we see now from thousands of years in the past, they’ll bear some kind of witness to us.

A stone carver can put into the working of the stone their thoughts, questions, dreams. Those carvers from history, across the globe, with skill and poetic justification, live on with us now, telling us elements of their thoughts, questions and dreams. Carved stone manifests the purposes of art, of poetry, in cultures around the world throughout human history. Stone endures. It can hold beauty for us.

These are the thoughts that now run through my life and work, and which I carve into stone. In nature, stone can tell us more than we knew we knew: the fossil record has allowed us to see into the geological past, and it’s shown us how to look further out, into deep space and deep time; we get a sense of how big our world is, and our universe. And also it’s shown us how to look further in, into the nature of matter, energy, time, and consciousness: both, outwards and inwards, showing us how little we know, how little we are. How we stand at a convergence of these two realities, the vast outside, and the unimaginably small, marrying them together in our human endeavours.

The stones worked those thousands of years ago, Greek, Etruscan, Roman, carry the power of the first essays into manifesting extremely complex realities, a culture that tore through the whole of the Mediterranean and left a vast amount of carved and built stone for us now to admire, wonder at and treasure. It’s the reason I live on the Tyrrhenian coast of western Italy, watching the seas where Odysseus sailed. It’s not so long ago, from my point of view, compared to the billions of years since the creation of our universe. I claim the Archaic Greek sculptors as my teachers, my guides. Look in, to your mind and heart, look out, to the star-studded night sky, and keep looking. It’s the only thing that begins to make sense.

There are profound mysteries in our lives, where we’re blind and helpless in the face of nature. We have to see ourselves, as the saying goes, through a glass darkly. To carve thoughtfulness into a stone, and bring the touch of a human life, a dream of beauty, of compassion, to a rock, whose existence is so wild, so simple and so much more ancient than ours, is a call, a bleat, into the future from us, now. The ancient Greeks still call to us from their time just as I desire my work to call to some unknowable future.

- Emily Young, Santa Croce, 2021