Sculptor Millicent
Young’s elegant minimalism is both paean to nature and compelling aesthetic
statement that pays homage to both the ancient and contemporary. With materials
that share an austere, clean, organic sensibility, Young limns a personal
oeuvre that demands the viewer to slow down and pay attention.
“Most all my work
is simultaneously personal and profoundly connected to the world, to our living
history of atrocities and vanishing habitats and species collapse and meltings
and so on, and it’s also joined with the inexplicable beauty that binds us.”
A combination of
accident and intuition goes into the selection of materials Young gravitates
toward and uses. Ordinary, non-precious, they share an intrinsic beauty,
mystery, and even paradoxical quality. She is drawn to them both for these
attributes and also for their capacity to transcend them to become something
much greater.
For instance,
horsehair gathers light and moves. And it has this associative aspect; it’s not
quite us; it’s not quite the other. We have hair too, but horsehair is not our
hair. It’s from a living being, but it’s dead. And it has a memory in its DNA.
“It ends up being a material that draws you in, but it’s also elusive. I like
that. I like that it is both beautiful, and for some people a little creepy,
even if it’s thinking: but where did this hair come from? So it’s beautiful,
but not entirely easy.”
Young began using
horsehair quite serendipitously when in need of a strand-like substance for a
sculpture, she happened to catch sight of a hank of horsehair on a hook in her
studio, a commemorative relic of an animal who had died. That day, sunlight was
hitting the hair and Young was transfixed by its luminosity. It’s one of those
things one doesn’t normally notice, but horsehair possesses a peculiar
incandescence that makes the strands almost seem lit from within.
Composed of 1,500
strands of white horsehair Luminous Room
is a bewitching rectangle of light. Standing in front of it, one feels hushed
and humbled by the simple and yet utterly sacred beauty on display. The shape
and substance evoke an enclosed room, but its luminous quality suggests the absence
of physicality and the quite opposite meaning of “room” as endless space. This
conundrum is a key element of the piece.
Each strand is
made by drawing out a long piece of thread and tying slipknots periodically
along it into which tiny bundles of horsehair—5 or 8—are placed. The slipknot
is pulled tight and a drop of glue is added to secure the strand in place.
Then, each template strand of several bundles is hung individually, one by one
onto cables. It’s both a very laborious and meditative process to make and install.
Young groups
thicker bundles towards the center of Luminous
Room, which creates the effect of a shaft of light from which emanates a
glowing halo made up of the surrounding hair. These central clusters of hair
are also longer, pooling on the floor beneath the piece.
Made from brown
horsehair, which is less incandescent than white, Murmuration III draws attention to the other physical traits of
horsehair: its coarseness, its waviness, its ombré tonalities. The distinctly
wing-like shape of the sculpture adds an exhilarating flourish and also
references the starlings of the whirling, aerodynamic display from which the
piece takes its title.
Working with
plaster and teabags filled with wood ash and pigment Young produces what is
perhaps her most enigmatic and emotionally charged work. “Plaster has a real
materiality to it, it has a wet and dry cycle and a real sense of flow. I love
the intimacy of the surface and how it records every nuance of the cast tea
bags in an indelible way. That was important to me because violence is that
way—how it marks us, marks the earth, marked me.”
Young submerges
the teabags at various levels in wet plaster. She then excavates them once the
plaster has dried. She became obsessed with this process, painstakingly
removing the contents and peeling out the paper casing. “The whole thing was
like excavating a body. The associations are just intense, peeling the tea bag
is like peeling away the skin.” On some, she backfills the excavated part with
plaster and then squirts it down so the pigments run. At the very end, she adds
delicate line drawings of wings above the wound-like depressions. These wisps
of graphite have an immateriality that stands in such contrast to the solid
presence of the plaster, they catch you unaware. "The wings arrived at the
very last, very suddenly and without being re-worked, and I knew that I wanted
them in the faintest pencil and just one line." Even to her their meaning
is cryptic, but they seem to imply a redemption of sorts.
With Ghost IV, Young turns the plaster panel
around to expose the convex impressions of the teabags. Just as the concave
shapes suggest a variety of associations, these evoke graves, gestational
bulges, pods. Suspense and anticipation hover over this work. What is beneath
the surface and is it about to burst forth?
Mounted on
handsome oxidized steel slabs that conjure a watery backdrop, there is
refinement and restraint in how the plaster pieces are presented. This rarefied
and considered approach to fabrication and presentation is characteristic of
Young’s approach.
Young says of the
plaster pieces: "This is the most intimately cathartic work I have ever
done; I realized what I was working with was my own experience of violence that
was done to me and was still inhabiting me. But at the same time, the work is
connected with all that's going on in the world."
Young brings a
sculptor’s sense of materiality to her two-dimensional work. She uses washi
paper, which has a particular translucence and is known for its ready
absorption. The ink doesn’t sit on the surface but stains the paper. In Slow
Violence Young’s extravagant blooms of ink resemble blossoms or vapor. They
appear both benign and also rather nefarious with hints of red pigment
suggesting vestiges of the violence of the title. The title provides another
conundrum that gives us pause. It seems almost oxymoronic—doesn’t violence
happen in quick, explosive bursts? Here, “slow” adds an insidious note,
implying a history of violence, happening over a period of time.
An Unfinished Story, another washi paper and ink work, takes
the form of a traditional Japanese scroll with drips and daubs of ink forming a
graceful line of contained energy. Young’s aesthetic is so aligned with the
Japanese, it’s not surprising she would incorporate the scroll form, but she
also uses it expressively, arranging the rolled up sections of the paper to
screen, and thus draw attention to, passages tinged with red—Young’s surrogate
for violence.
"These works
became a conversation about movement. The density of the ink the expansion and
contraction of the paper, etc. And you only get one chance. For every one like
this, there are 20 others that didn't work."
Moving through all
of Young's work is the concept of the kōan, a Buddhist teaching tool that takes
the form of a nonsensical question intended to help focus the mind by leading
it to a place where patterned constructs fall apart. The kōan is there to stop
you, causing you to observe and consider natural, everyday phenomena that we
tend to overlook. The beauty, the magic and sacredness, it’s all right there,
if you only harken and look.
“My hope for my
work is that it brings us to a place where we remember awe. I would never want
to say that my work inspires awe; that’s not who I am. Awe is out there, but we
forget about it. One of the things awe does is it silences us. It shares this
with the kōan; after the kōan, it’s silent. In the Buddhist tradition, silence
is necessary to become awake.” It is then, in this heightened state of
awareness that awe returns and we can truly see and appreciate the sublime.
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