Translucence and Light: Ivory Onyx
Emily Young, Archangel Michael - The Protector, Photo: George Rex
The British sculptor Emily Young uses onyx for its translucent qualities. Young, regarded as the UK's greatest living stone sculptor, works with various stones, but her onyx heads, torsos, and discs radiate light. She cuts the stone to show its skin and its imperfections. Growing up between Rome and Wilshire in a family of artists, writers, and politicians, the Colosseum and Stonehenge equally informed her visual vocabulary. One of her classically inspired public works, "Archangel Michael - The Protector," depicts the angel's head in ivory onyx with one side of the face broken away. Located on the grounds of St. Pancras New Church, London Borough of Camden, it serves as a Memorial to the Victims of the 2005 London Bombings and all victims of violence.
Emily Young, Lunar Disc I
Young's massive abstract lunar and solar discs illuminate the darkness like prehistoric celestial beings. She creates them by sawing through one billion-year-old semi-translucent onyx boulders to explore time, nature, and memory. One of them, Lunar I, made from ivory onyx, started its life on the northwest lawn of the Close of Salisbury Cathedral in 2004. The magical sphere traveled to Loyola University Chicago, where the college installed it in 2010. Each of Young's sculptures reveals and enhances the natural beauty and energy of the stone. Unsurprisingly, she is attracted to onyx; in Roman mythology, the Fates transformed the fingernail clippings of Venus, the goddess of beauty, into chalcedony to immortalize her.
QuarryHouse Turkish Ivory Onyx
Are you seeking your own piece of immortality? QuarryHouse's inventory includes four blocks of exquisite ivory onyx quarried from Turkey and hand selected by Ed Westbrook and his Italian partner, Camiran Rasool of CITCO. Whether you dream of taking up a hammer and chisel or want QuarryHouse to create, fabricate and install a bespoke design, samples are on display at our Richmond, California, Workshop. Photos and Block information can be provided on request. A recent example of our skilled artisans' work is a carved filigree ivory onyx panel echoing Mughal motifs for a Rubaiyat-inspired temple.
QuarryHouse Ivory Onyx Carving
