Isabel Young Surrey, United Kingdom

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Isabel Young is an artist and Senior Tutor (Research) at the Royal College of Art. Drawing on archaeological theory and experimental archaeology, she works within an expanded field practice exploring the socio-cultural dynamics and history of the house, its integrated environments, and the people who lived in them.

Isabel Young’s long-term research explores the socio-cultural dynamics and history of the house and the people who lived in them. Drawing on archaeological theory and experimental archaeology, she works within an expanded field practice that references ancient houses, ancient practices and associated environments. Interested in the ways that ideas of the present have come from past contexts, she considers the people who occupy/ied ancient spaces in recognition that what is happening now is a result of what has come before.

Young’s practice takes its coordinates from primary research and references her recent fieldwork in the ancient dwellings of the Pompeii Archaeological site, the Heart of Neolithic Orkney, passage graves of Jersey and other archaeological excavations, while transporting into the present to investigate a cross-section of the contemporary home. Historic and contemporary spaces are reimagined here as ‘Monuments’ in recognition of the house and associated rituals as a repository of material culture and interface between home, its lineage of inhabitants and non-human assemblages. This work journeys immense tracts of time researching how people have lived differently over time giving insights into different ways of being in the world, and into the place that we find ourselves in today.

A recent example of Young’s practice ‘The Lararium Project’ (a shrine to the household gods) can be visited in the Roman Villa at Butser Ancient Farm, a museum of experimental archaeology. As a permanent fixture, the lararium is used for education and re-enactments gaining further insight into religious practices and associated rituals.