Emily Young

Emily Young was born in London in 1951 into a family of writers, artists, politicians, naturalists, and explorers. She is the granddaughter of the sculptor Kathleen Scott and the niece of the naturalist Peter Scott. She worked primarily as a painter as a young woman, studying briefly and without completing a degree at Chelsea School of Art, then at Central Saint Martins in London and at Stony Brook University in New York, though the exact dates and duration of this study are not documented.

She began working in stone in the early 1980s, often carving reclaimed and discarded quarry material rather than new-cut stone, and developed the practice of leaving raw, unworked stone alongside carved human faces and forms, a signature tension between the geological and the figurative. Her first documented solo show was at the Sue Rankin Gallery in London in 1993. Over the following decades her work moved into major public and institutional settings, including presentation at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and her sculptures are held in collections that include St Paul's Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral. She continues to work today, dividing her time between studios in Italy and Dorset, with a showroom in London. She was named a Guest of Honour at the Florence Biennale's fifteenth edition, an honor reported as 2025 but not independently confirmed for its exact year.

Young's critical reputation rests heavily on her standing as, in language attributed to the Financial Times and repeated by galleries, museums, and the Royal Society of Sculptors, "Britain's greatest living stone sculptor." That framing, of a solitary and singular practice within contemporary British sculpture, recurs across gallery and museum texts describing her. Recognition has broadened in recent years beyond gallery walls: her reported 2025 Guest of Honour status at the Florence Biennale points to growing biennial-level attention, alongside her long-standing museum presence at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Emily Young's auction market is small relative to her institutional profile. The clearest documented sale is Quartzite Crystal Dryad I, a bronze from 2024, which sold for GBP 30,440 at Lyon & Turnbull's Modern Made auction in spring 2026, a work the artist donated with proceeds benefiting the mental health charity Allkind. Third-party auction aggregator sites reference other, higher sale figures for her sculpture, but these figures are inconsistent: MutualArt's own pages have shown a highest recorded result as low as USD 62,700 in one pull and as high as USD 600,702 in another, with no specific work, date, or house attached to either number. Given that inconsistency, no additional auction figure beyond the Lyon and Turnbull sale above can be responsibly published here.

Young's auction footprint is small and uneven, and the one recent sale with full, confirmed details, the 2026 Lyon & Turnbull bronze, was a charity donation by the artist rather than a typical secondary-market resale, so it should not be read as a stable benchmark. Figures reported by third-party auction aggregator sites are internally inconsistent and could not be pinned to a specific work, date, or house, so collectors should treat any single reported "record" with caution until it can be verified against a primary auction house record. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and authentication should run primarily through the artist's studio; current commercial gallery representation is not clearly confirmed in public sources. Her strongest signal of durability remains institutional: cathedral, museum, and biennial placement rather than auction depth.