Angel IV, 2003
Emily Young
Paternoster Square, London

If you happen to be in London, walking past St Paul’s Cathedral and into Paternoster Square – look up. You will see five magnificent angel heads mounted on pillars, gazing out over the city. When the square was redesigned, the sculptor Emily Young was commissioned to make these guardian figures. Young has been described as inheriting the mantle of Dame Barbara Hepworth as Britain’s greatest living stone sculptor. Her works are instantly recognisable. She employs spectacular lumps of stone – quartzite, onyx, marble, alabaster – carving a figure but leaving the remainder of the rock displayed in its raw state, as if the image has grown or evolved organically. As a result, these angels are magisterial, yet they are also flawed, broken, or disfigured. They are reminiscent of the tall, melancholy angels perched on the buildings of Berlin in Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire but also of the triumphant archangel in Jacob Epstein’s sculpture St Michael’s Victory over the Devil outside Coventry Cathedral. Angels have often been depicted as rather fey, ethereal figures, but as the feast of Michaelmas, or St Michael and All Angels, is observed in November in the Eastern Christian tradition, it is somehow reassuring to think of this awesome angel watching over the capital, and indeed over all of us.

Art in Focus is curated by Meryl Doney

This article is published in the October 2024 edition of Reform

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