Emily Young, environmental sculptor

AMPLIFICATION

We can all trace the origins of our dreams within the story of our everyday lives.

E.Y.’s dream begins in childhood, intertwined with her connection to stone. It started with the stones of ancient Rome, where she lived as a child, and those of Wiltshire, where she spent her holidays in a primal landscape of wind and stone. In this setting, the Neolithic monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury were local companions, and the Sarsen stones became her personal friends.

Supported by artistic talent, imagination, and a deep sensitivity to the natural world and the Universe, E.Y. gradually developed a mental interaction—an “inner marriage“—with the Cosmos.

The symbols of the cosmos become one with E.Y.’s emotions and desires. Through the mechanism of amplification—arising from the interaction between her emotional experiences and the symbols that enable their expression—the narrative of her works takes shape. Amplification, serving as a bridge between the Ego and the unconscious, heals and resolves any sense of loneliness within her and dissipates the illusion of omnipotence that so often defines humanity.

E.Y.’s imagination weaves natural symbols of unity between Earth and the Universe—such as the Cosmic Egg, the imagined form from which the Planets, the Moon, and the Sun originated—into a dialogue with discoveries about the origins of the universe. In her, these symbols merge with emotions, feelings, intuitions, and reflections, allowing her to sense the very breath of the universe.

She finds stone—a material that embodies and reveals the history of the planet—and stone finds her. This encounter consecrates her to sculpture, an event E.Y. describes as “The marriage made in Heaven.”

E.Y.’s stone sculptures become her medium for conveying a message of compassion and fostering a new awareness of the environment. She spreads a sentiment she calls “pre-emptive mourning”—an anticipatory grief for what we have lost and are continuing to lose. This feeling, she believes, is essential for cultivating in humanity the cooperation, receptivity, sensitivity, and spiritual awareness needed to prevent human extinction and save our planet from the fate science predicts: the collapse of the solar system in a billion years.

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