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.
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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.
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.
External collaborations and activities
Isabel is an Academic Member of the Landscape Institute (UK's chartered professional body for landscape architects), a Member of the Vernacular Architecture Group, and of the Surrey Archaeological Society. She is also a Member of EXARC (Professional Association for Experimental Archaeology, Ancient Technology & Interpretation).