​ISABEL YOUNG

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Practice Context

 

My long-term research as Senior Tutor (Research) at the Royal College of Art explores the socio-cultural dynamics and history of the house, its integrated environments, and associated beliefs and rituals. Drawing on archaeological theory, I work within an expanded field practice contextualised through ancient houses and ancient practices.

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My practice takes its coordinates from primary research drawing directly on the immersive, embodied experience of landscapes, ancient burial sites, ancient places and ancient homes. Recent fieldwork includes the ancient dwellings and necropolis of the Pompeii Archaeological site which inspired a series of ‘Pompeii Memorials’. This summer I journeyed back 5000 years to Orkney in search of one of the oldest Neolithic settlements and numerous burial cairns. In October - November 2024 I went ‘in search of ghosts’ to an ancient island of geological time, a place to encounter the Palaeolithic Age in Europe and home of the Neolithic: Jersey. The main focus of this fieldwork was to descend into the Neolithic passage grave of La Hougue Bie, which is one of the 10 oldest buildings in the world.

 

For me the ancient, in all its forms, is an encounter with the presence of those who have come before. It inspires reverie, reverence, feelings of awe and a connection to a great lineage of people.

 

Burial Works

 

Antigone: powerless, young, female, resists authority to obey the ancient imperatives of piety and the law of the gods. Creon: autocrat, king, male, commits his living niece to the tomb leaving the dead above ground and unburied. By violating the ancient edict of life and death Creon’s abuse of power pollutes the city of Thebes, and now isolated he endures a suffering of his own creation. Yet Antigone, with her act of resistance and rebellion in the face of her own destruction, remains an iconic figure who compelled a patriarchal audience of 441BC (and beyond) to question their own values.

 

Interested in the ways that ideas of the present have come from past contexts, I consider the people who occupy/ied ancient spaces in recognition that what is happening now is a result of what has come before. The artworks presented here build on my ‘Memorial’ series of expanded paintings that reference my fieldwork in the ancient dwellings and necropolis of the Pompeii Archaeological site, and vernacular architecture in the South-East of England.

 

In these burial works I look specifically at ancient burial practices and rites of passage. The two works ‘Grave Marker’ and ‘Antigone’s Mausoleum’ are derived from an interred architectural scaled-model based on my former London home built then buried in my garden 3 years ago. Exhumed on the 29th May 2024 the excavated remains of my own home is un-built through decomposition. Simultaneously a destructive and creative force the act of burial has the potential to be restorative.

 

Liberated through the destruction of the object, and preserved and in an incomplete new form, ‘Grave Marker’ is rehoused in a coffin and ‘Antigone’s Mausoleum’ to a vitrine. As we live through a time of exceptional change Antigone, with its religious and political themes of conflict between generations, state and individual, male and female, brings solace as we look to the rise and fall of recurrent themes of the deep past.