Millicent Young

I always enjoy going to Charlottesville, but this last trip was really extraordinary. Not only did I meet the lovely Cary Brown, on the way home I went on a studio visit to see Millicent Young. I have been looking for an artist, a sculptor specifically, to show at SFC in March. I found Millicent through the Washington Sculptors Group. I'd seen her work in group shows at Arlington Arts Center and Zenith Gallery and had thought about contacting her - so, finally the opportunity presented itself!

I hardly can put into words what an amazing experience it was to meet her and see her work in person. She lives on a farm in Ruckersville, so serene and beautiful you step out of the car, take a long deep breath and think oh my lord, I have found heaven.

There is a purity in Millicent's work, the materials are somehow scrubbed down to basics - clay, iron, glass, wood, bones, horsehair, wax... One piece especially, "Trans-" (image here) really moved me. The beauty of the x-ray of bones with the other elements of the piece is so thought provoking. (perhaps because I've always loved looking at x-rays and sonigrams - there is something so "secret of life" and private about them) Millicent's art feels inevitable. Her mastery of materials is coupled with a serious sense of play. She forces you to interact - to tease meaning out of the work. And there are layers and layers of meaning.



Millicent's artist statement.

As a sculptor, I am a citizen. All of my work is focused on the possibilities of transforming our Cartesian paradigm - a paradigm that is both personal and cultural and which enthrones separation and destruction as ways of being. The outcome of this way is the indiscriminate loss of our habitat and relations, be it through bombs or logging. It is the loss of Home and our sense of belonging. One power that Art has is that it can foment change by stirring the heart from within. It can show us what we cannot see. It reiterates the primordial process of creation - spirit into matter, formlessness into form - and can connect us to that which is greater than self. No less of a change is required.
And so, Hope resides at the core of my work. I seek to restore Beauty and Stillness as ways of knowing and as tools of transformation. The pieces are visual meditations that do not seek an answer to transformation but rather, pose questions about our constructions of reality, about possibility, and about process. They are invitations to dream this moment forward. They reveal a gap, the liminal gateway. The gap frames this premise: there is the known , the unknown, and the unknowable.



Millicent's web site is rich with content http://www.millicentyoung.com/