Onyx Torso II

Emily Young

(British, Born 1951)

2016
Onyx
Height 29.5 cm

Emily Young is 'Britain’s greatest living stone sculptor' (Financial Times)

She was born in London into a family of writers, artists, politicians and adventurers. Her grandmother was the sculptor Kathleen Scott, a colleague of Auguste Rodin and widow of the explorer Captain Scott of the Antarctic.

As a young woman, Emily Young worked primarily as a painter, having studied briefly at Chelsea School of Art, Central Saint Martins London, and Stonybrook University, New York. She left London in the late 60s, and spent the next years travelling through the USA, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, South America and China. It was during these travels, whilst encountering an extensive range of cultures, that she developed her broad view of art and its history.

In the early 1980s Emily Young started carving in stone, raiding quarries yards for materials from all around the world. The primary objective of her sculpture is to bring the natural beauty and energy of stone, including its capacity to embody human consciousness, to the fore. Her sculptures have unique characters due to each individual stone’s geological history and its geographical source.

Angel I, St Paul’s Churchyard, St Paul’s Cathedral

Her approach allows the viewer to comprehend a commonality across time, land and cultures. Her constant preoccupation is our troubled relationship with the planet, which underscores her studio practice. In her combination of traditional carving skills with technology, she produces work which marries the contemporary with the ancient, manifesting a unique, serious and poetic presence.

Young’s work is in important public and private collections throughout the world. She has exhibited at many prestigious museums including: The Getty, California; The Imperial War Museum, London; The Whitworth, Manchester; The Meijer Sculpture Gardens, Grand Rapids, and in 2018, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

She is represented exclusively, worldwide, by Bowman Sculpture.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2018 Christies, London

2018 New College, Oxford

2017 Bowman Sculpture, London

2017 Victoria Beckham / Emily Young, Dover Street, London

2017 St James Church, Piccadilly


2016 Bowman Sculpture, London


2015 Call & Response, The Fine Art Society, London

2015 Call & Response: Cloister of Madonna Dell’Orto, Venice, coinciding with the 56th Venice Biennale

2015 Stone from the Mountain, The Fine Art Society, Edinburgh

2014 Cassandra / Earth II, Berkeley Square, London


2014 Emily Young: Four Heads, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester


2013 We are Stone’s Children, The Fine Art Society, London

2013 We are Stone’s Children, Cloister of Madonna Dell’Orto, Venice, coinciding with the 55th Venice Biennale

2012 Lithica, Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh

2011 The Metaphysics of Stone, Berkeley Square

2011 Emily Young at Neo Bankside, South Bank, London

2011 The Maremma Heads, The Fine Art Society, London

2010 Microcosms, Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh

2009 Angels and Archangels, Salisbury Cathedral, Salisbury

2009 Teardrop, The Fine Art Society, London

2008 Singing Stone, Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh

2007 The Fine Art Society, London

2006 The Crypt, St Pancras Church, London

2005 The Fine Art Society, London

2004 The Crypt, St Pancras Church, London

2003 Kew Gardens, Richmond, London

2002 Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

2001 Leighton House Museum, London

1999 Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

1997 Recent Stone Carvings, The Fine Art Society, London

Selected Group Exhibitions and Important Loans

2018 Contemplative Head, The Victoria & Albert Museum, London

2018 On the Pedestal, Dublin Castle & Castletown House, Kildare

2017 Frieze Sculpture Park, London

2017 Rodin and the Contemporary Figuration Tradition, The Meijer Sculpture Gardens, Grand Rapids

2016 Beyond Limits, Sotheby’s at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire

2015 The Violet Crab, David Robert’s Art Foundation, London

2013 Carving in Britain since 1910, THe Fine Art Society, London

2013 Messerschmidt and Modernity, The J. Paul Getty Foundation, California

2012 The British Cut, The Space, Hong Kong

2007 Art at the Rockface, Norwich Castle and Sheffield Millennium Galleries

Permanent Installations & Public Collections

St James Church, Piccadilly, London

University of Notre Dame, Chicago

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

The David Robert’s Art Foundation, London

Artemis, London

The Imperial War Museum, London

La Defense, Paris

National Bank of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Paternoster Square, St Paul’s Cathedral, London

Salisbury Cathedral, Wiltshire

Standard Life, Edinburgh

St Pancras Church, London

Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA), Chicago

Loyola University, Rome

The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

Neo Bankside, South Bank, London

Cloister of Madonna Dell’Orto, Venice

Anglo American, London

The Frank Cohen Collection