EMILY YOUNG | SHATTERED VISAGES

Emily Young, Earth Dreamer II, 2022, Portuguese Rose Marble, 74 x 68 x 70 cm. Courtesy of Willoughby Gerrish

Emily Young has created four sculptures especially for British Art Fair, to be shown by Willoughby Gerrish. The largest of these, Earth Dreamer I, will be erected outside Saatchi Gallery in Duke of York Square, for the duration of the weekend and until October 26.

‘Britain’s greatest living land sculptor’* Emily Young achieved cult notoriety before she reached adulthood, but not for her remarkable prowess as an artist. An early adopter of hallucinogenic drugs, she was, as a 15-year-old Notting Hill schoolgirl, friends with Pink Floyd’s ill-fated frontman Syd Barrett. So much so that Barrett wrote a song about her, which still glides high in the psychedelic pop canon: See Emily Play.

And how she’s played! Young went on to study painting at Chelsea and Central St Martins, before embarking on a culture-absorbing hippie tour across Africa and Asia, ending up in New York, where she studied under American still-life artist Robert White. She became interested in stonework in the 80s, soon chiselling out the monumental figurative pieces she has become best known for, often seeking out discarded materials from abandoned quarries to work with.

Her sculptures have an unfinished look about them, as smooth faces appear out of jagged rock, bringing, as one critic puts it, ‘the human project of meaning into conjunction with geological time’. These figures evoke Michelangelo’s Slaves (aka Prisoners): forever embedded within a specific moment, yet simultaneously rendered immortal. Have her creations turned to stone; or been born out of it?

It’s as much about the rock, as about the human form. About the unique geological history of each piece of stone she works with. She classes herself as an environmental artist, stating in her website bio: ‘the primary objective of [my] sculpture brings the relationship of humankind and the planet into closer conjunction. The natural beauty of stone, including its capacity to embody human consciousness, can endure into the future of a vast, unknowable universe.’ 

It’s mind-blowing stuff, then: post-apocalyptic mementos of the human era, nothing beside remaining, as the lone and level sands stretch far away†.

Willoughby Gerrish will be exhibiting the other three Emily Young pieces at Stand 6, alongside works by Elisabeth Frink, Kenneth Armitage, Anthony Caro, Barbara Hepworth, Gerald Laing, Michael Lyons, Bernard Meadows, Henry Moore and Austin Wright.

*Financial Times 

†Apologies to Percy Bysshe Shelley