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