Isabel Young is an artist and curator, her work focuses on establishing an emerging art-archaeology field concerned with building Heritage Futures and advancing interpretive possibilities.
Isabel Young is part of the founding team who established the Graduate Diploma in Art & Design at the Royal College of Art in 2018. Her teaching specialism is interdisciplinary art and design, foregrounding contemporary art, material culture, sites and architectural spaces across time.
Isabel is Ambassador and Judge of the Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award and the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award which provide substantial funding for MA Painting students at the RCA. In 2025 Isabel was awarded the status of Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). Also in 2025, she became Co-Chair of the Research Ethics Network.
As an active researcher and curator, Isabel’s art-archaeology creative research has been included in numerous exhibitions and projects. Conceptualising exhibitions as living-labs and envisioned as sites of excavation, Isabel’s curatorial practice situates contemporary art in critical dialogue with archaeology and heritage futures.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
Gallery
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Research Interests
The central preoccupation of Isabel Young’s long-term research is to establish an emerging art-archaeology field dedicated to the Neolithic of the Atlantic Archipelago. It explores how contemporary art can engage with archaeological understandings of Neolithic material culture in the region to reconceptualise Neolithic sites and situations in the building of heritage futures, and advancement of interpretive possibilities.
Fieldwork in ancient archaeological landscapes is central to Isabel’s practice. She travels whenever she can and her research has led her to some of the most significant ancient monuments of Atlantic Europe. Through this Isabel has established a distinctive research field informed by archaeological theory and experimental archaeology.
Practice
Isabel’s research engages with multiple aspects in the field of art and design and involves interdisciplinary approaches. Primarily the work extends existing contemporary art practice as an aspect of current theory surrounding ‘expanded painting’. Her practice has reached new conclusions by combining apparently paradoxical processes involving architectural software and traditional painting to form multi-modal hybrid works, where the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, painting, constructed photography, sculpture and assemblage converge.
Conceptually, her practice investigates architectural space and the built environment as a reflection of how we once lived, and how we now live. Young’s wall-based works form an intersection between fictional realities and real spaces, making associations between object making, image making and spatial design. Artefacts and architectural indicators inhabit the work, either as found objects, artist-made or artist-painted. They are representative of the evolution of human intellect and our material existence and shift the work between vast distances to one of nearness associated with the cocooned universe of the still life.
The making of the work involves multiple modes of production including digital, scale model-making, assemblage and painted surfaces. Significantly the work originates in AutoCAD, an architectural software where it is in theory possible to draw infinitely, albeit dependent on available memory, and to zoom in and out of virtual spaces. This proposes a unique platform from which to derive a painting, which historically has been confined to the dimensions of its frame. From here the digital moves to laser-precision technology and the physical cutting of exotic woods to be assembled and painted into a hybrid oscillating between the architectural model and traditional oil painting. Drawing on influences from landscape architecture, scale takes on a principle role where measurement represents vast distances or specified dimensions. The final outcomes of the process represent a new form of painting that physically separates (or implodes) the internal mechanisms of a painting into a spatial formation similar to that of a stage set.
Through her partnership Hand + Young Projects Isabel is undertaking research into the areas of drawing, architecture and expanded painting. She is particularly interested in the capacity for drawing to disseminate complex ideas and the use of drawing beyond the disciplines of art and design. As such she is currently in the process of curating a large-scale exhibition that will present the diagrams of scientists alongside drawing by designers, architects and artists.
Research funding
Award from the Oppenheim-John Downes Memorial Trust
The Basel H. Alkazzi Travel Scholarship to New York
Awards
The Gilchrist Fisher Award for Landscape Painting
The Gordon Luton Award for Fine Art from the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers
The Jerwood Contemporary Painters.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Isabel Young’s art-archaeology practice-led research has been included in numerous exhibitions and projects including: a solo exhibition at ‘Metaverse Art Space’ (2024) that investigated art ‘with’ archaeology in contemporary digital platforms, The London Group (2025), a group exhibition at The Hunt Museum, Ireland (2025), ‘Deep Time’ at Newark Works, Bath (2024), ‘Dwellings’ at Fronteer Gallery (2024), ‘Hidden’ at House of Smalls (2024), ‘Silent Disco’ curated by Graham Crowley (2023), ‘Fictions II’ – a two-person exhibition with Gary Clough for Blyth Gallery at Imperial College (2022), ‘Fictions I’– a two-person exhibition with Gary Clough for The Cello Factory, London (2020), ‘Speed of Thought’ at Newington Gallery, London (2019) and ‘Activate’, a research exhibition with RCA colleagues (2024). Isabel is also a member of the ‘Drawing as Interdisciplinary Research’ network group which began as a symposium at The Drawing Room in 2023.
Current and recent projects
'In Search of Ghosts’: Establishing an Art-Archaeology Field
Year: 2025
‘In Search of Ghosts’ was an interdisciplinary contemporary art exhibition curated by Isabel Young at 44AD Artspace, and as part of Fringe Arts Bath (FaB), which attracts around 8000 festival visitors. The exhibition showcased creative responses to archaeology, and explored a prospectional orientation showing how artistic practice can critically reflect on the present through the imagined perspective of future archaeologists. It included the work of 19 participants across art and design.
Project Title: The Lararium Project
Year: 2023
A recent example of Young’s research ‘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 museum interpretive device, the lararium is used for education and re-enactments gaining further insight into religious practices and the socio-cultural dynamics of the Romano-British home. In March 2024, she presented ‘The Lararium Project’ at an international conference ‘Drawing Conversations V: What and Where is Home?’, hosted by the University for the Creative Arts.
‘Speed of Thought’: An Interdisciplinary Contemporary Drawing Exhibition & Symposium
Year: 2019
‘Speed of Thought’ was an interdisciplinary drawing exhibition and symposium co-curated by Alison Hand and Isabel Young at Newington Gallery, Art Academy London and submitted for REF2021. The exhibition showcased science and creative practices and investigated the purpose and practice of drawing beyond assumed definitions. It included works by 34 international participants and re-defined drawing as a ‘mode of thinking’. It championed dialogues and research enquiry between the professions of science, technology and the arts and humanities, establishing new associations connecting institutions, universities and individuals.