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Stuart J Young – Visual Artist


Stuart J Young explores form, colour, and structure through painting and sculpture, creating works that examine the interplay between material, space, and perception. His practice investigates how objects and surfaces hold tension, rhythm, and narrative, inviting viewers to experience both presence and process in the artwork itself.


Stuart’s work is informed by an interest in collaborative dialogue and site-responsive projects, including joint explorations with Eila Goldhahn that engage movement, photography, and immersive installations.




 
In his paintings, Stuart J Young explores the interplay of form, colour, and structure. Using layers of Indian ink, pigment, and subtle shifts in tone, he creates surfaces that invite close looking and sustained attention. The works examine the tension between abstraction and suggestion, writing and mark making, surface and depth, drawing the viewer into a meditative engagement with space and material. Each painting is a reflection of process as much as image, revealing the rhythms and textures that emerge through attentive making.




Prayers

In Prayers, Stuart J Young explores the calligraphy of sacred texts. Some of these works resemble mandalas, while others seem to open up voids and unknown universes. Using Indian ink, watercolour, and natural pigments on paper, Young conveys fragility through an embodied, visible language. In a concentrated, mindful state, his haptic making enters a space between the human and the ‘other’.


During 2024 and 2025, Prayers toured Balabrook Retreat House on Dartmoor, Birdwood House Gallery in Totnes, Poolhaus Blankenese in Hamburg, Germany, and The Plymouth Art Weekender.

Stuart J Young in the Project Space at Pfaelzer Hof Artist Residencies







Tenuous


This series of work began in Germany around ten years ago. The sculptures are slender and delicate, embodying an almost immaterial quality of being and relating. There is an uneasy movement and inscription of space, as if their forms make the air around them tremble, perhaps as though pierced.

The Tenuous tabletop-sized sculptures, made from papier-mâché, formally explore movement and tension between two or three lines or abstracted figures. They are informed by observations of plants, animals, and humans in relational, somatic, and gestural interactions. There is a sense of vulnerability in these works, alluding to fragility, temporality, and perhaps an impending demise. Tenuous has been envisaged as models for life-size sculptures or utopian architectures.

They complement still points in installations of Eila Goldhahn’s MoverWitness dance films.









Sculpture


Stuart J Young develops a body of sculptural work inspired by classical modern sculptors such as Jean Arp and Henry Moore. He carves figures directly in wood — apple, holly, and other timbers — or models them in plaster, which can then be cast in metal or ciment fondu. The surfaces may be pigmented with ochres and siennas, polished with beeswax, or left simply painted, revealing the textures and rhythms of the material. Through this process, each piece embodies both the physicality of making and the quiet presence of the finished form.








Stuart J Young / Exhibitions:

Dudley Museum & Art Gallery, Dudley, Midlands
Chapel Gallery @ Saltram House, National Trust, Plympton
Delamore Arts, Dartmoor, Devon
Poolhaus Blankenese, Hamburg
Warburg-Haus, Hamburg
Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery, Plymouth
The Ariel Centre, Totnes, Devon
Birdwood House Gallery, Totnes
Skulpturengruppe, Minden, Westfalia
Keitumer Skulpturentage, Sylt, Germany
KunstRaum Weissenohe, Nürnberg
Open Studios, Bad Homburg v.d. Höhe, Frankfurt
Artist Residency Pfälzer Hof, Idar-Oberstein, Germany
Bibliothek, Idar-Oberstein



All images and ideas © Eila Goldhahn & Stuart J Young 2024
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