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Emily Young at the XV Florence Biennale 2025
Acclaimed by the Financial Times as “Britain’s Greatest Living Stone Sculptor,” Emily Young will present her work as one of the Guests of Honour at the XV Florence Biennale, themed “The Sublime Essence of Light and Darkness. Concepts of Dualism and Unity in Contemporary Art and Design”.
Young was born in London in 1951 into a family of writers, artists, politicians, naturalists, and explorers. As a young woman, she worked primarily as a painter, studying briefly at Chelsea School of Art, Central St Martins in London, and Stonybrook University in New York. She left London in the late 1960s and spent the next years travelling widely, studying art and culture. It was not until around the age of 30 that she decided to follow in the footsteps of her grandmother, sculptor Kathleen Scott—a friend of Auguste Rodin—and fully committed herself to sculpture. In the early 1980s, Young began creating large-scale sculptural works. She typically starts a piece without knowing how it will look, describing her creative process as collaborating with the stone: “The stone lets me know what it can do and what it cannot do.”
Between Us and Nature
Stone discs, torsos, and heads are recurring motifs in Young’s work. She sculpts with a variety of stones—including onyx, volcanic limestone, lapis lazuli, crystal, etc—often favouring discarded materials from abandoned quarries. These stones can sometimes weigh several tons and date back thousands or even billions of years. Stone has played an important role throughout human civilisation. Monuments such as Stonehenge, pyramids, the Parthenon, and the Moai statues stand as powerful evidence, proving their close connection with humankind and the planet we live on. The primary objective of Young’s sculpture brings this relationship into closer conjunction. Her approach invites the viewer to comprehend a commonality across deep time, geography, and cultures. The use of traditional carving skills, allied with technology where necessary, allows her to produce timeless works which marry the contemporary with the ancient. Her work manifests a unique, serious, and poetic presence.
At the heart of Young’s work is a profound concern for humanity’s troubled relationship with the planet. Young stated in an interview: “We thought the Earth is this great beneficent mother and we can take anything we want from her. And in fact, we now know she is not infinitely generous; she has her limits.” Through the wildness and stillness embodied in stone, Young captures fleeting moments of tranquillity and peace. Her sculptures—which could endure for millions of years—explore the dualism of interrelationship and alienation between human civilisation and nature—a duality that reminds us of our origins and our impact on the environment.
