Emily Young: Song of Stone

When I was a child, staying in my grandfather's house, the stone remains of a sixty-six million year old geological period littered the area, a valley in Wiltshire. They are the Sarsen stones, lifting out of the valley floor, like small weather-worn mountains.

We would play games, leaping from stone to stone, trying not to fall from the stones into the grass.

I knew each stone in our near vicinity, and felt they were fellow players in the game, each with its own personality and character. They lay quietly, through the seasons, curious animals to my young mind. The great stones of Stone Henge were close by, and Avebury: they were mysterious relations in some sense, that I felt I knew personally, fellow entities born of the Earth. With their feet in the dark soil, and their shoulders towards the sky, the winds, rains and storms of aeons didn't trouble them much it seemed. I was impressed at their silent resilience.

If I lay on my back on one of the mossy, lichen spotted stones, I could nestle comfortably into  its declivities, and dream I was sailing on a silent boat, watching clouds pass overhead: I could feel the depth of the land like a strong gentle force flowing into my back: I could feel the darkness beneath me, and the time.

That feeling has not left me as I grow older, and in fact it covers the whole planet, available to anyone who would care to try it: to just feel what is coming from the land you lie on - into your body…

I would say that the ultimate purpose of my work is to try to touch the heart of the viewer, to show the look of that powerful stillness, a stillness that can hold the full pageant of life as a human, filled with so much pain, worry, distress and beauty.

The Earth is our creator, our great Mother, and there is no separation: we delude ourselves with notions of control, of separation. Look where that delusion is leading us.

The stone's stability, the hard rock, the consistent silent interior darkness allows feelings of a quietude to enter our minds, our bodies, where a connection might be born, experienced. Out of unimaginably strong processes of creation and destruction, where the world was created, stone holds the story of our four and a half billion year old history, and gives us a way to to read the land, understand something about our history.

The various uses of stone across the millennia of human life on earth can hold something of human cultures and consciousness: in their nature, once worked and used, worked stones carry the evidence of cultures in their forms and construction. Worked stone was used in a wide variety of ways, and could survive into the future. Our human preoccupations could become manifest in stone, making hand tools, vessels, weapons, eventually to include the carving of the human form, to be seen by the contemporary world perhaps as gods, perhaps as spirits embodied in stone, or just for fun, for our ancestors preoccupations…Their stony enterprises allow us some kind of access to their minds.

And the stone itself, carved by our ancestors, becomes the holder of their dreams and fears, and often remains intact, over the millennia as a state of matter: we can see in its nature its resilience, its competence - to endure over the millions and billions of years, or transforming into untold new forms of matter.

Cultures used stone to communicate with Gods, and the stones could become embodied prayers. I do the same: I work with each piece of stone, by listening, watching, waiting to be guided. Together we find a face, a form, torsos, discs, which can carry something difficult to be precise about, but it holds beauty, and compassion: the stillness of the stone can speak to us. Honouring the material world, touching something beyond words.

— Emily Young