Charles Young is a Scottish artist living and working in Edinburgh, where he studied architecture at Edinburgh College of Art. His sculptures, in paper and wood, and animations draw from the forms and structures of the built environment. Young's Four-Colour Studies, a collection of 108 small paper structures produced over the course of ten months, was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy annual exhibition in 2022. The work was a first foray into the use of colour, using a book of early 19th-century colour combinations to define the hues for each piece.
Much of his work in recent years has been based on the serial production of small paper structures, building up day by day to create assembled urban landscapes out of the individual parts. These long-term constructions have acted as explorations of shape, the physical possibilities of paper as a material and, more recently, colour, as well as becoming a kind of journal or visual diary. His current work focuses on the idea of architectural ‘holdouts’, buildings that have been left behind within new waves of development and placed in a new context.
During his time in Leipzig, Young will continue to develop these ideas of buildings becoming detached from their original place in the world by looking at the structures of the Spinnerei, a complex which itself exists and functions in a new context, as well as other places in the city. The size of the studio space will allow him to focus on producing larger pieces of work in wood, cane and paper than has been possible up to this stage.
