ISABEL YOUNG
EXPERIENCE, RESEARCH & PRACTICE
Isabel Young is an interdisciplinary lecturer, practitioner and researcher working three-dimensionally within contemporary art practice, and current theory surrounding ‘expanded painting’. Young’s multi-modal hybrid works are drawn from the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, painting, sculpture and constructed photography. Conceptually her practice investigates architectural space and the built environment as a reflection of how we once lived, and how we now live, making associations between object making, image making and spatial design. Technically the work combines the processes of architectural software, scaled model making and installation to represent a new form of painting that physically separates (or implodes) the internal mechanisms of a painting into a spatial formation similar to that of a stage set.
Young also works within curatorial practice and in November 2019 she launched ‘Speed of Thought’, an Interdisciplinary and seminal drawing exhibition which she co-curated with Alison Hand for Newington Gallery, Art Academy London. It included works by 34 participants from a diverse range of disciplines across science and the arts: architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, fashion design, vehicle design, contemporary art practice, illustration, sculpture, print, film, music, science, planetary science, geoscience, biology, bacteriology and computer science.
Isabel Young is a Tutor (Research) at the Royal College of Art on the Graduate Diploma in Art & Design. She is part of the team who launched and established this programme, for which she lectures across art and design disciplines with a focus on fine art, product, interiors and spatial design. She has contributed significantly to the curriculum design and evolution of the Graduate Diploma, and continues to play a key role in the academic delivery and assessment of the course.
Young has exhibited through multiple platforms and her most recent body of work was presented in 2020, just prior to lockdown, in a significant two-person exhibition at The Cello Factory with Gary Clough. Her expanded paintings were also exhibited in an earlier two-person exhibition ‘Architecture of Landscape’ in London at Arthouse1 Gallery with Alison Hand.
Young is dual qualified with a Masters in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art and a Masters in Landscape Architecture with distinction from the University of Greenwich. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2002 she had exhibited extensively across the United Kingdom and internationally in New York, Ireland, Japan and Thailand. She has had solo exhibitions in London and at the Laing Art Gallery, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums. Her work has won many awards including the Gilchrist Fisher Award for Landscape Painting, The Gordon Luton Award for Fine Art, the Basel H. Alkazzi Travel Scholarship to New York and the Jerwood Contemporary Painters. I was recently granted an award from the Oppenheim-John Downes Memorial Trust to develop my practice and produce a new body of 3D work. Two of the works have recently been acquired for the Permanent Collection of The National Museum of Gdansk, Poland.
ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART STAFF PROFILE
