Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1239894
74 Emily Young FRBS b. 1951 Emily Young was born in London to a family of writers, artists and thinkers. She spent her youth in London, Rome and Wiltshire and has been called "Britain's greatest living stone sculptor". She has worked exclusively in stone since the Eighties using old fashioned hammer and chisel, angle grinder and sandpaper and works directly on the stone. Emily Young's peaceful Angel Gabriel sits quietly, meditating between the great old cedar trees in the Cloister Garth. We can see a human profile emerging from a raw block of white marble, there is a sharp contrast between the smoothly carved and polished surface of the features and the raw natural stone that frames the angel's face, hinting at wings. The head exudes a profound spirituality, humanity and youthful innocence, created to celebrate and contemplate the beautiful unique and fragile planet that we inhabit. The archangel manifests as a messenger from Heaven and has been described in many ways in the history of Christianity, Judaism and Islam and can symbolise emotional, physical and spiritual experiences and also suffering pain and joy. Her works have a formal simplicity, they meditate on time, nature and memory and our relationship to the earth. "The human heads I carve embody my perennial preoccupations: the frailty and quickness of human life and emotions, against the backdrop of the slow inexorable and enduring magnificence of stone, and its creation through the long and unspeakably dramatic history of the formation of the Earth." – Emily Young. Angel Gabriel, 2008 Purbeck Stone 90 cm Acquired in 2009 This is not the only piece in the exhibition to combine stillness and movement. Might it suggest that faith is paradoxically both a matter of the active and the passive and that if an imbalance is set up between the two, faith is somehow reduced?