We are very pleased to be starting the new season at Thirsk Hall Sculpture Garden with an exhibition of work by Emily Young who has been called 'Britain's greatest living stone sculptor' by the Financial Times. She views her relationship with the stone as a partnership, choosing to free carve rather than forcing predetermined ideas onto the material. In essence, she allows the stone to dictate the final form of the sculptures.
To coincide with the exhibition in Gallery One some of Young's monumental sculptures will be placed within the garden and parkland.
Emily Young:
When I first started to carve stone some forty years ago, I was constantly asking myself, what is this that I’m doing, and why am I doing it? Here are some thoughts around those two questions.
To engage with one’s hands with a material that manifests, that tells the history and creation of the planet is philosophically and physically very engaging. I enjoyed working with the stone, an enterprise between the two of us, a kind of marriage.
Then the ramifications are multifold.
My human consciousness works with the very matter of the planet, respectfully, asking the stone to play with me, to allow me to engage with it in this interplay of mind and rock. It is full of absolutes, of hardness and strength, and it carries it’s long history as a kind of gift for me to discover. I am conversely extremely recently arrived on earth, comparatively.
It was British geologists studying fossils on the hills of western Britain in the 1800s who pushed back our notions of the age of the planet, and this extra time gave Charles Darwin the scope to formulate his theory of evolution. So reading stones allowed for the beginning of an understanding of the history of life on earth. Life started on earth some 3.7 billion years ago. Possibly earlier.
As a conscious entity born in 1951, a teenager in the 60s, it was obvious to me by my early adulthood that things weren’t looking great for our planet. And I had made various connections. The greed, cruelty and incompetence of some people would make it difficult if not impossible for most life forms on earth to pursue lives of dignity and joy, when it could have been possible with a different set of values. I like the idea of human-kinds life on Earth properly being a picnic party.
I feared the worst, and still do, though equally I’m hopeful that we can tech our way out of disaster. But the cat is out of the bag, death and destruction are the successful game plan for neo-liberal capitalism, and so we roll onwards into catastrophe.
The stone that has endured for billions of years, (the Earth is 4.5 billions of years old) can endure for another one billion - when the sun starts to die, to become a red giant, expanding and consuming the closer planets, Mercury and Venus. It will burn off all the water on Earth. And then, the earth will be a rock, bare of all life. Ultimately it will all turn to dust, disintegrating into the universe.
My thought is that the things made of stone will last longest. (The story of man’s antecedents can be read in the stones they worked with, over 3.3 million years.) And that the heads, discs and torsos I make now will carry the message that some of us were peace loving people, capable of deep thought and profound compassion and connectedness with all life on earth. It’s a silent howl into the future, saying - we knew, we loved our staggeringly rare and beautiful home, our mother, see how calm and thoughtful we are, can be. How much we care. How sad we are that we broke our home.
A billion years is a long time , obviously. And all sorts of things can happen. For me, now, the hand carved stone sculptures are a hand held out to the future, acknowledging the stony past, and trying to connect somehow from a broken human present. Potential is probably limitless, love is required by all, the creation of the universe is far beyond words, and we are of it, of its glory and darkness. I want the stone to keep singing our song.
