Footnotes

Provenance
With The Fine Art Society, London, 1 December 2005, where acquired by
Private Collection, U.K., thence by descent to the the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, The Fine Art Society, Emily Young, 2005

Emily Young was born into a creative family in London, her grandmother was the sculptor Kathleen Scott, a colleague of Auguste Rodin and her uncle Sir Peter Scott started the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in 1961. She began her career as a painter, studying at Chelsea School of Art and Central St Martins in London before travelling extensively, but by the 1980s she had started to carve stone, a medium she has since dedicated herself to for the last forty years.

Young practices 'free sculpture', where she approaches each block with no pre-conceived ideas or preparatory drawings but rather allows the material to speak and guide the form that emerges. Using the most ancient of mediums, her unique vision is at once contemporary and antique. The heads are Michelangelesque in their organic emergence from the rock, part polished, part rough-hewn, with each example wholly individual as the material itself dictates the final outcome with every fault and vein celebrated rather than concealed.

'The looks on the faces of the angels are not planned as such, they arrive and surprise me often with their softness and sadness, and strength and calm. But like all good angels, they have a certain graveness, an objectivity, a touch of the infinite, and a certain compassion.' (Emily Young, Working with Stone, emilyyoung.com, 2003)

Young's sculpture is held in many public and private collections around the globe and she has exhibited at prestigious institutions including The Getty, California, the Imperial War Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

We are grateful to EY Sculpture UK Ltd for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.