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 installation.
Sculpture
This series of work, Tenuous, began in Germany some ten years ago. The sculptures are slender and fine and embody an almost immaterial quality of being and relating. There is an uneasy movement and inscription of space, as though their bodies make the air around them tremble, perhaps from being pierced.
Tenuous tabletop-sized sculptures is made from papermache and formally explores movement and tension between two or three lines or abstracted figures. They are informed by observations of plants, animals and humans in relational, somatic, gestural interactions There is something vulnerable about these works as they allude to fragility and temporality, perhaps to an impending demise. Tenuous has been envisaged as models for life-size sculptures or utopian architectures. They compliment still points in installations of Goldhahn’s MoverWitness dance films.
Stuart J Young also develops a body of sculptural work inspired by the classical modern period, drawing on sculptors such as Jean Arp and Henry Moore. He carves figures directly in wood — for example, apple or holly — 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.
Painting and Calligraphy
In his paintings, Stuart J Young explores the interplay of form, colour, and structure. Using layers of pigment, mark-making, and subtle shifts in tone, he creates surfaces that invite close looking and sustained attention.
The works examine the tension between abstraction and suggestion, 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.
The works examine the tension between abstraction and suggestion, 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.
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’.
Stuart J Young / Exhibitions:
Dudley Museum & Art Gallery, Dudley, Midlands
Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery, Plymouth
Chapel Gallery @ Saltram House, National Trust, Plympton
Skulpturengruppe, Minden, Westfalia
The Ariel Centre, Totnes, Devon
Delamore Arts, Dartmoor, Devon
Keitumer Skulpturentage, Sylt, Germany
Open Studios, Bad Homburg v.d. Höhe, Frankfurt
KunstRaum Weissenohe, Nürnberg
Bibliothek, Idar-Oberstein
Warburg-Haus, Hamburg
Birdwood House Gallery, Totnes
Artist Residency Pfälzer Hof, Idar-Oberstein
Poolhaus Blankenese, Hamburg
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