Emily Young

(British, born 1951)

Blue Angel Head 55.7 cm. (21 7/8 in.) high (excluding the base) Carved in 2005

Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, U.S.A., since 2005

Emily Young is an artist highly tuned in with and aware of the past. She has always theorised on a scope of ideas much larger than the immediate artistic context, bringing "the human project of meaning into conjunction with geological time" and beyond, taking into consideration the cosmic origins of the stone she works (R Trew, Emily Young, www.emilyyoung.com). Emerging from the block as if over aeons, her work participates in an idea of sculpture that dominated the artistic paradigm of the pre-eminent Renaissance sculptor, Michelangelo – who in turn drew very consciously from Ovid's mythical Pygmalion: the idea that the work lies imprisoned within the block of stone, waiting to be released. Considering Young's Heads alongside Michelangelo's group of Slaves (Accademia, Florence) brings this idea to the fore, and ties the present piece, and its place within Young's wider oeuvre, both to a deep sense of sculptural inheritance and to the more "geological" context that the idea itself implies.

But to think of Young's work as paying homage to the past without an eye to the present and future would be mistaken. Tied in thematically with the geological past of her work is where this has taken us to, and the direction to which it leads: in her own words, "Hyper-industrialisation has encouraged us humans of the developed world to profoundly misread the planet we live on", and this misreading has resulted in the debate over whether we are entering a new geological age – the Holocene – one that is defined by our own impact on the world around us (Emily Young, Emily Young, www.emilyyoung.com). A testament to Young's focus toward this is her part in this year's 60th edition of Venice Biennale, titled Carbon II: Carbon Capture Art, where her work is now on display at the Palazzo Mora as part of an exhibition based on the importance of the arts in tackling climate change.

Within this context, Blue Angel Head comes in as a work in many ways typical of Young's output, but in others, crucially outstanding. In its emergence from the stone, it firmly partakes in the ideas that so preoccupied Young's sculptural predecessors. However, where some of her works lie more passively within the stone – as if serenely dormant in expectation of being meticulously and painstakingly drawn out – this feels emphatically active, almost assertive. It has an agency in its emergence from the stone, like it is working with the artist, breaking free as Young loosens the chains.

As outstanding as the energy of Blue Angel Head is the material it is worked from: Brazilian sodalite, which is rare within Young's oeuvre. An ornamental stone, the strong blue adds an incredible depth to the work, punctuated powerfully by the streaks of white that separate sodalite from its cousins lazurite and lapis lazuli – reminders of the geological vein running thematically throughout Young's work. Where others avoid the unpredictability of these inclusions in the mineral, Young embraces them, delighting in its faults, veins, splits and idiosyncratic form that inject an urgency to the work's unquenchable desire to escape. Sodalite is opaque in massive blocks, but has a translucence in thinner areas that give the present work a subtle, transient glow, something that cannot be replicated in mineral of a duller tone.

Young seems keenly aware of the sense that her work will outlast us, that in freeing the stone of its prison and into its human form, she is preserving an image of ourselves that is timeless in its still beauty and empathy, yet intensely contemporary in its concern. She recognises the vulnerability of that which she depicts: "the short-lived and organic" humanity (Emily Young, Emily Young, www.emilyyoung.com). As Young grapples with our vulnerability, Blue Angel Head breaks free from its block, eager to animate as if by Pygmalion himself.

We are grateful to the Artist and EY Sculpture UK Ltd for their assistance in cataloguing the present work.