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Lot Essay
At over four feet high, Torso, is a monument of luminous honey onyx. The seams of impurities and ancient imperfections that run through her carvings are indispensable in shaping the final form and Young investigates the structure of the stone adapting these to serve her practice. In few other artist’s works does material play such an important role. Young’s sculpture not only brings to the fore the true beauty of the raw material she works with, but also recognises that it is a mass mined from the surface of the Earth. Her sculpture, in being so clearly hewn from the ground, encourages the viewer to meditate on our relationship with the natural world, as well as comprehend breaches in time and culture.
Carved from a single piece of stone, Torso permeates an ageless quality. This is seen not only in her choice of stone but in the classical beauty of sculpture, which at times seems almost devotional. Young described that the notions of time and devotion were important to her work, she explained, ‘So my work is a kind of temple activity now, devotional; when I work a piece of stone, the mineral occlusions of the past are revealed, the layers of sediment unpeeled; I may open in one knock something that took millions of years to form: dusts settling, water dripping, forces pushing, minerals growing – material and geological revelations: the story of time on Earth shows here, sometimes startling, always beautiful’.
Young brings stone carving to the forefront of British contemporary sculpture, building on, and reinventing, the oeuvre of 20th Century giants such as Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Her work is held by many private and public collections, with permanent installations on show at St Paul’s Churchyard, the Imperial War Museum, Salisbury Cathedral and St James Church, Piccadilly. She has exhibited at many prestigious museums including The Getty Center, Los Angeles; The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; and The Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids.
We are very grateful to Emily Young for her assistance in cataloguing this lot.
Carved from a single piece of stone, Torso permeates an ageless quality. This is seen not only in her choice of stone but in the classical beauty of sculpture, which at times seems almost devotional. Young described that the notions of time and devotion were important to her work, she explained, ‘So my work is a kind of temple activity now, devotional; when I work a piece of stone, the mineral occlusions of the past are revealed, the layers of sediment unpeeled; I may open in one knock something that took millions of years to form: dusts settling, water dripping, forces pushing, minerals growing – material and geological revelations: the story of time on Earth shows here, sometimes startling, always beautiful’.
Young brings stone carving to the forefront of British contemporary sculpture, building on, and reinventing, the oeuvre of 20th Century giants such as Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Her work is held by many private and public collections, with permanent installations on show at St Paul’s Churchyard, the Imperial War Museum, Salisbury Cathedral and St James Church, Piccadilly. She has exhibited at many prestigious museums including The Getty Center, Los Angeles; The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; and The Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids.
We are very grateful to Emily Young for her assistance in cataloguing this lot.