ARTIST STATEMENT

In Search of Ghosts

Isabel Young is an artist, curator and Senior Tutor (Research) at the Royal College of Art, London where she has been a lecturer since 2018. She holds a Masters in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art and her art-archaeology practice has been included in numerous exhibitions and projects. She works within an expanded field practice uniquely combining architectural model-making, sculpture and assemblage.

A second Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of Greenwich gave her a profound appreciation of landscape as an assemblage of past worlds. Fieldwork in ancient archaeological landscapes is central to her practice. She travels whenever she can and her research has led her to some of the most significant ancient monuments of Europe. Through this she has established a distinctive art-archaeology field informed by archaeological theory and experimental archeology.

A recent example of Isabel’s practice includes ‘The Lararium Project: Art and Experimental Archaeology’ (2023) for which she sculpted a Romano-British household shrine for Butser Ancient Farm, a museum of experimental archaeology. As a permanent fixture of Butser’s Roman Villa, the lararium is actively used for education and reenactments gaining insights into the dynamics of Roman domestic life and ancient practices.

Alongside her creative practice, Young also curates. ‘In Search of Ghosts’ (2025) was an interdisciplinary contemporary art exhibition curated at 44AD Artspace, and as part of Fringe Arts Bath (FaB), which attracts around 8000 festival visitors. The exhibition showcased creative responses to archaeology and re-examined past worlds and their assemblages from a contemporary position. Significantly, the impact of this curatorial project opened up questions about how our own Plastic Age might be decoded in 5000 years, and speculated on the future archaeology of waste.

Young’s long-standing preoccupation with the nature of time continues to inform the practice which more recently takes a prospectional orientation to critically reflect on the present through the imagined perspective of future archaeologists. Her live project is dedicated to the Neolithic of the Atlantic Archipelago, and traces continuities from early agricultural societies into the present-day. Working experimentally with food packaging and drawings of Neolithic rock art, the work makes an intertemporal leap between Neolithic and contemporary societies. It asks what material traces and infrastructures will endure and how profusion, waste and food systems affect deep time. Developing out of recent new-materialist and posthumanist theory, this project brings Neolithic domains into dialogue with contemporary environmental debates.

Isabel lives in Surrey where she has transformed her house into a dedicated studio-lab. When she is on campus at the RCA her teaching specialism is interdisciplinary art, foregrounding contemporary art, material culture, sites and architectural spaces across time.

Young is Ambassador and Judge of the Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award and the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award. In 2025 Isabel was awarded the status of Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). Also in 2025, she became Co-Chair of the Research Ethics Network at the RCA.

Isabel is an Academic Member of the Landscape Institute (UK's chartered professional body for landscape architects), a Member of the Vernacular Architecture Group, and a Member of EXARC (Professional Association for Experimental Archaeology).

Isabel Young’s art-archaeology practice has been included in numerous exhibitions and projects including: a solo exhibition at ‘Metaverse Art Space’ (2024) that investigated art ‘with’ archaeology in contemporary digital platforms, The London Group (2025), a group exhibition at The Hunt Museum, Ireland (2025), ‘Deep Time’ at Newark Works, Bath (2024), ‘Dwellings’ at Fronteer Gallery (2024), ‘Hidden’ at House of Smalls (2024), ‘Silent Disco’ curated by Graham Crowley (2023), ‘Fictions II’ – a two-person exhibition for Blyth Gallery at Imperial College (2022), ‘Fictions I’– a two-person exhibition for The Cello Factory, London (2020), ‘Speed of Thought’ at Newington Gallery, London (2019) and ‘Activate’, a research exhibition with RCA colleagues (2024). Isabel is also a member of the ‘Drawing as Interdisciplinary Research’ network group which began as a symposium at The Drawing Room in 2023.

About The Lararium Project

‘The Lararium Project’ was a research project undertaken in 2023, which can be visited at Butser Ancient Farm, a museum of experimental archaeology in Hampshire. The project saw the design and installation of a new lararium (a shrine to the household gods) for Butser’s Roman Villa. Simultaneously a working construct of the past and a reimagined household shrine for the present, the goddess Ceres replaces the Genius (the male head of the house) in dedication to the female deity of the harvest in reference to the farming role of Butser as a haven for wildlife, rare breed animals and endangered crops. The lararium is richly painted and constructed to replicate a miniature temple simulating an interface between the divine, the spirit world, familial ancestors, place and householders through the symbolic imagery and traditions of veneration. Images of snakes adorn the surfaces since they were seen as protective spirits of the house during Roman times and closely associated with household shrines.

The lararium opened during Chichester Roman Week when the Butser IX Roman Legion were in residence at the museum re-enacting living history to demonstrate what life would have been like in Roman Britain. As a permanent fixture of Butser Ancient Farm’s Roman Villa the lararium continues to be used for education and re-enactments gaining further insight into religious practices and associated rituals, and to explore the cultural dynamics of the Roman home.

The Lararium Project led to presenting at ‘Drawing Conversations V: What and Where is Home?’, an international conference on 15 March 2024, convened by Greig Burgoyne and Jill Journeaux, and hosted by University for Creative Arts. The papers have been published and can be found at the link below (pages 50-60):

ISBN is: 978-1-0369-1174-4

https://uca.assetbank-server.com/assetbank-uca/assetfile/73899.pdf

The Lararium can be visited at Butser Ancient Farm, Chalton Lane, Chalton, Waterlooville, PO8 0BG

Information can be found on their website: https://www.butserancientfarm.co.uk/blog/2023/5/30/a-new-shrine-for-the-roman-villa