Millicent Young

What it is to be human in a larger than human world has been the focus of my work for 28 years. Fragility, endurance, loss, awe, and paradox: these are portals to transformation individually and collectively expressed. They are central to the content, form, and context of my work. My practice is informed by spiritual ecology, cultural practices of transformation and healing, and the essentiality of inter being. Art is a liminal space.

Focusing on subjects such as extinction, habitat collapse, and the atrocities of war, my work challenges what divides us: within our own being, human from human, human from other than human, culture from nature. Neither beauty nor brutality exists in isolation. The boundaries that define victim and perpetrator or predator and prey are movable. To witness grace and violence is to face the irreconcilable. The artist and the viewer as witness become permeable; to be changed is to create change.

The materials I use are both substance and symbol. They are ordinary and often provided by my place: deadfall trees, vines, barbed wire, waste lumber from sawmills, architectural steel and window frames from derelict buildings. Other materials include: hair, fur, clay, glass, plaster, lead, ink, raw pigments. They both contain memories and record new memories through touch, erosion, evaporation, fire, and other processes of construction and reduction. The materials record and collapse time.

I make all my pieces by hand with simple tools and methods I have developed over years. Some processes are highly repetitive, the form emerging through accretion. Others involve a single irreversible action; from many attempts only one is right. All labor is a powerful ritual, a physical engagement with the unknown and the record of labor itself becomes content.

For the past five years my practice of making sculpture has grown to include working in installation, in iterations, and in multidisciplinary intermedia projects. In these projects, I integrate sound, poetry, and movement with the sculptural installation to create a layered sensorial experience.