Artist's Statement: Sculptor Emily Young on moving to Italy, bling in London and the feminine approach

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

Emily Young, whose new exhibition is showing in a church cloister for the Venice Biennale and at the Fine Art Society in London, on the solar system, the sacred and the feminine approach

“I’d been working in London, down by the railway line at Paddington in what had been a lost property building for British Rail in the old days. We took a lease on it, but you had three months’ notice.

They were planning to knock it all down but it took longer than they thought. We were hanging on by the skin of our teeth. It was very exposed, cold, with a lot of wind and rain and gloomy days. Eventually we all had to leave because of improvement works.

For the same price as my flat in North Kensington, I got a half-ruined monastery up a little hill in Italy. It was through a friend who used to run opera festivals during the summer.

The place really lends itself to that dramatic beauty – the sounds are beautiful there. The rooms are vaulted, even if they’re a bit cold in the winter, when I’m living and working there.

It seemed like a dream – how could this possibly be true? But Italy’s been going through a lot of austerity and there’s a lot of stuff for sale out there.

If you turn up and make people an offer, they do accept silly ones - although my offer wasn't silly.

I walk out of my front door and there are these amazing stones lying around on the floor waving at me. It’s amazingly different from London. The summers are very hot and the winters are pretty wild.

I’m very exposed there, but I really like being close to nature. The night sky is unbelievably strong and you can hear the wild winds blowing in the trees at night. You feel that you are outside of contemporary western culture, which is a big relief.

I’m not like the traditional stone sculptor who makes a little model and gets it made bigger by technicians. I don’t know what it’s going to be. I think it’s a very female approach, more like a conversation between me and the natural stuff that is the stone.

I’m very respectful of the earth. I think the planet is in terrible danger of not being a good home for us unless we turn around and behave properly towards her.

These pieces are a manifestation of that. They are more than half the story. I want them to show the relationship that I think we should have with the planet.

You see the beauty in the natural material – respect it, honour it. All the great religions came from trying to explain where the world came from and how we got to be where, how and who we are.

This story of the origins of the earth – our solar system, the galaxy, the universe – we can have spiritual feelings about them and moral codes.

That’s the biggest story. There’s even a sense of the sacred. Humans like to feel that they’re part of something much bigger that is beautiful. For me, it’s a good way to live your life: you’re honouring the planet, saying thank you to your great mother.

We’re actually destroying it. That’s not much good, is it? In London, so many things are being pulled down and what’s being put up is not better.

It’s just going to make somebody some money. The banks and property developers are making a killing. But actually there’s a beautiful, wild world out there which brings far more satisfaction. What do very rich people do when they get their money? They go off to a little island far away from everybody where they can sit with their feet in the sea.

I think a lot of the new architecture is infantile. Humans are good at being babies. We want to be provided with everything and not take any responsibility, leave a mess behind.

Everything’s shiny, bling-bling-bling. That’s not really acceptable given the threat to the future of the planet and to our children and animals.

I work with stone because it’s the oldest material that we’ve had access to. It endures. It was the stuff we first used, up to four million years ago when our ancestors were making scrapers or banging things together.

What I want to put into the stone now is that I am one human who is conscious. I have an awareness of the raw beauty and ancient history of the planet.

Apparently the future is probably going to be bigger than the past, so I’m talking to the future as well. There will be these very large lumps of stuff that have been carved.

I think it’s a very beautiful tradition that I work in – the classical, Greek renaissance type. People might just get a sense that there are other ways of using the earth.

I’m a bit maverick – I’m not really in any of the public collections. They’re not sure what to do with me. They’d rather have what I think of as infantile bits of stuff. It would be lovely if some of my works went into public spaces where kids could see them, particularly young women artists – I would love it if there were more of them in the future, with a more feminine approach to looking after the planet.

Men can also have a feminine approach, but at the moment it’s seriously weighted towards this tramline thinking about progress and improving technologies. Someone’s got to talk about this stuff.

The technologies will always change, but the human side of it – emotions and a connection to the universe – they stay the same. It’s a timeless thing.”

• Call and Response: London is at the Fine Art Society until August 27. Call and Response: Venice is in the Cloisters of the Madonna Dell'Orto church until November 22.

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Three museums and galleries to see great sculptures in:

Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, St Ives
Barbara Hepworth's studio and garden have been at Tate St Ives since 1980, following the wishes of her artist, after her death in 1975, that Trewyn Studios and the adjacent garden would provide a permanently-open showcase of her works to the public.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton
Current exhibitions at the Wakefield wonderland include Henry Moore: Back to a Land and major displays of the works of Rob Ryan and Antony Caro.

Buckingham Palace, London
The State Rooms of the Palace, open to visitors during the annual summer opening in August and September, are lavishly furnished - including sculptures by Canova and Chantrey.

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/art531648-artist-statement-sculptor-emily-young-on-moving-to-italy-bling-in-london-and-the-feminine-approach