Millicent Young

Lives and works in High Falls, NY, USA

Artist statement

My sculptures and installations speak to vulnerability, resilience, brutality, beauty, and grief in the time of extinction. The quiet forms make space for us to be with what we’d rather turn away from. I create handmade forms with simple tools and processes. Labor is a contemplative ritual. My materials, often gathered or repurposed, carry both ecological and cultural significance. The reconfigurations and state changes the materials undergo point to transformations necessary for existence. The integration of sound, video, digital technologies, and performance with my handmade work reflect my ongoing pursuit of emergent forms constructed from a vocabulary of divergent things: solid/ephemeral, digital/organic, architectonic/biomorphic, still/moving, etc. Rooted in the fragmentation of our contemporary existence — war, displacement, and the collapsing biosphere — my work addresses such events as matters of soul where personal and collective consciousness converge. Intimacy and beauty persist alongside the atrocity in the artworks and the unfolding poly crises from which they derive. The splitting of ourselves from within, from each other and from other beings, and from place and memory have been concerns of my work for three decades. Belonging is a relationship among place and others, a sense of being begat of need and desire. The abrogation of belonging runs through every dimension of extinction we face and that we as humans are the face of. Natural processes of...

Artwork