Biography
Isabel Young is an artist, curator and Senior Tutor (Research) at the Royal College of Art, London where she has been a lecturer since 2018. She holds a Masters in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art and her art-archaeology practice has been included in numerous exhibitions and projects. She works within an expanded field practice uniquely combining architectural model-making, sculpture and assemblage.
A second Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of Greenwich gave her a profound appreciation of landscape as an assemblage of past worlds. Fieldwork in ancient archaeological landscapes is central to her practice. She travels whenever she can and her research has led her to some of the most significant ancient monuments of Europe. Through this she has established a distinctive art-archaeology field informed by archaeological theory and experimental archeology.
A recent example of Isabel’s practice includes ‘The Lararium Project: Art and Experimental Archaeology’ (2023) for which she sculpted a Romano-British household shrine for Butser Ancient Farm, a leading museum of experimental archaeology. As a permanent fixture of Butser’s Roman Villa, the lararium is actively used for education and reenactments gaining insights into the dynamics of Roman domestic life and ancient practices. The lararium remains accessible to Butser’s 60,000 annual visitors, including 35,000 school pupils.
Alongside her creative practice, Young also curates. ‘In Search of Ghosts’ (2025) was an interdisciplinary contemporary art exhibition curated 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 re-examined past worlds and their assemblages from a contemporary position. Significantly, the impact of this curatorial project opened up questions about how our own Plastic Age might be decoded in 5000 years, and speculated on the future archaeology of waste.
This prospectional orientation has led to Isabel’s most recent work which is dedicated to the Neolithic of the Atlantic Archipelago, and traces continuities from early agricultural societies into the present-day. Working experimentally with food packaging and drawings of Neolithic rock art, the sculptures make an intertemporal leap between Neolithic and contemporary societies.
Spanning 6000 years from the Neolithic to the present, Isabel Young's sculptural practice critically reflects on the present through the imagined perspective of future archaeologists. It asks what material traces and infrastructures will endure and how profusion, waste and food systems affect deep time. Developing out of recent new-materialist and posthumanist theory, the work brings Neolithic domains into dialogue with contemporary environmental debates.
Isabel lives in Surrey where she has transformed her house into a dedicated studio-lab. When she is on campus at the RCA her teaching specialism is interdisciplinary art, foregrounding contemporary art, material culture, sites and architectural spaces across time. Young is Ambassador and Judge of the Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award and the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award. 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 at the RCA. Isabel is also an Academic Member of the Landscape Institute (UK's chartered professional body for landscape architects), a Member of the Vernacular Architecture Group, and a Member of EXARC (Professional Association for Experimental Archaeology).