Beshara News
Time in the Stone
15th May - 29th June 2007
Open daily from 10am - 6pm (closed Mondays) FREE entry
The Crypt at St. Pancras Parish Church
Euston Road, London, NW1 2BA
(Entrance via Duke Road - right opposite Euston Station)
Reviewed by Richard Twinch
"I carve in stone the fierce need in millions of us to retrieve some semblance of dignity for the human race in its place on Earth. We can show ourselves to posterity as a primitive and brutal life form - that what we are best at is rapacity, greed, and wilful ignorance, and we can also show that we are creatures of great love for our whole planet, that everyone of us is a worshipper in her temple of life"
Emily Young achieved a certain immortality in 1971 as the inspiration behind the song "See Emily Play" penned by the elusive genius Syd Barrett of the Pink Floyd. Travelling from a London childhood, to a European education, to a life lived as an artist round the world, she began to interact with the timeless quality of stone to produce breathtaking sculptures of luminous intensity and great beauty.
Her latest exhibition in the buzzing heart of London provides a window into another world of devotional contemplation - beautifully enhanced by the enclosed, cool dampness and silence of the crypt - each work lying waiting to be discovered - often hidden from view until turning a sharp corner a new revelation appears. As Young explains in the accompanying booklet:
"So my work is a kind of temple activity now, devotional; when I work a piece of stone, the mineral occlusions of the past are revealed, the layers of sediment unpeeled; I may open in one knock something that took millions of years to form: dusts settling, water dripping, forces pushing, minerals growing - material and geological revelations: the story of time on Earth shows here, sometimes startling, always beautiful"
As well as marble, she carves in semi-precious stone - agate, alabaster, lapis lazuli . These not only reflect and refract the light - but glow with a passionate intensity (as Winged Golden Onyx Head), revealing the hidden crystalline structure of the material (as in Indian Quartzite Head) and the subtle layers the time has laid down (as in The Boat) - showing the liquid qualities of hard rock.
Her devotion to and interaction with time is incredibly expressed in the slowly rotating, illuminated sculpture called "The Equation of Time" . This sculpture is carved from billion-year-old golden chalcedony, and is a scale model made of the shape traced over a period of ten thousand years by the Earth as she rotates round the Sun which expresses the `wobble´, or precession, caused by a gigantic collision from which the Moon was formed. The shape itself was designed by Danny Hillis who is using it in his construction the `Clock of the Long Now´ in the Texas desert, which "invites us to contemplate our future, and the future of our planet. It reminds us of our place in the universe, and speaks to an awareness of the preciousness and precariousness of life on Earth".
The form of `The Equation of Time´ is serendipitously similar to that of the female form, of which Young is a great carver as shown in the many torsos that are found concealed in niches in the crypt. As with these nudes it is the play of light, both on the surface of the form and penetrating within and sometimes through, that is the real subject - it is what we see and are aware of. "The Equation of Time" revolving slowly as it does on its central axis, as a Mevlevi dervish spins, is a poem to and of light which reveals the subtle folds and nuances of its sinuous form.
You would need a heart of stone not to be profoundly moved by this exhibition and the visitors´ book bears witness to the intensity of the experience. This reviewer´s own contribution came in the form of a poem:
Tread silently here
And think softly
Lest you disturb the presences
That gaze back to the beginning
And look forward to the end
Get there if you can, if not there is a book and more information on the website
http://www.emilyyoung.com