Surfaces of Law

Series of digital C-type photographs, 2023 and ongoing

A preview selection from Surfaces of Law, Young’s large, ongoing photographic series, which portrays details of many courthouses, prisons, law firms, law schools and other law-related buildings across Europe, to consider how architecture can serve as a metaphor for the law itself. In the artist’s words, “the project explores the ‘materiality’ of law as a lived and living system which people experience emotionally and haptically, no matter the nature of their interface with ‘the law’.” Young’s use of grids, saturated colour and sharp rectilinear planes of these post-War and recently built sites visually conflate artistic ideas of abstraction with law, institutional and state power, whilst evoking the absent bodies of those implied by the system itself. Selected photographs from the series, as exhibited at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York in Jan-Feb 2024 (images above) feature cells, prison seating and beds, security areas, and other disciplinary or carceral spaces in Belgium, Switzerland, and France.

The artist is grateful for a Leverhulme Research Fellowship which supported the creation of this body of work.