Il Tirreno

BATIGNANO. For 30 years she hadn’t known anything, then one day a friend called her and revealed a secret to her he had just discovered in a book ... «Hey, did you know Pink Floyd’s Emily is you?» What a story. It was in 1967 that she, the sixteen-year-old Emily Young with long black hair and a magnetic gaze, was seen one evening in London by Syd Barrett, the mythical frontman of Pink Floyd who drew inspiration from her for a single, “See Emily play”, recorded in 1967 and at the top of the English hit parade for weeks. She never knew anything about it until some years ago a friend read a biography and discovered the mystery.

Today that girl is 63 years old and is considered the greatest living sculptress in the United Kingdom. She lives in Maremma where she bought an ancient convent - the Convent of Santa Croce – and sculpts her works in an atmosphere of magical sacredness. «Buongiorno», she smiles opening the door wide; it is a November morning. Short black hair, a vert beautiful, intense face, blue eyes and a gentle manner, the artist/muse of rock welcomes us in her monastery, commissioned in seventeenth century by the venerable father Giovanni degli Agostiniani scalzi John of the barefoot Augustinians (an order founded during the Counter Reformation) and previously owned until recently by another English artist, the friend and scenographer, Adam Pollock, who had fallen head over heels in love with her.

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Centuries-old olive trees and hills as far as the eye can see surround the cloister, the convent warm with life and the rooms of the monks where one breathes an ancient peace that the artist had long sought. This fantastic place, in which every corner evokes – in the stuccoes and lunettes - the figure of Giovanni, it was for years, thanks to Pollock, the pulsating heart of a music festival famous throughout the world, before becoming a new, enchanting art workshop, with its proliferation of sculptures. A beautiful en plein air museum: an Orpheus of colossal dimensions is under construction; spectacular heads and disks appear between tears and arches of light. Alabaster, onyx and malachite. Stones extracted from Mount Amiata are masterpieces of a permanent exhibition of which the convent is a privileged museum.

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«This mountain - says Emily - is sacred for Italy». Emily, born in London in 1951, grew up in an environment of artists and writers. Her father was correspondent for the The Guardian in Italy, her mother worked at the Foreign Office and was a colleague of Pollock’s mother. Her grandmother, Kathleen Scott was sculptress, a pupil of Auguste Rodin and wife of an explorer of the Antarctic, Captain Scott. Her husband, who died some time ago, was a musician and founder of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, a famous United Kingdom ensemble. Emily travelled a lot and lived in France, America, India and Rome. Thanks to holidays with her family in Lazio and Tuscany as a little girl – thanks to the family friendship with Pollock – she discovered this convent for the first time «at once experiencing a powerful emotion», destined to tie her forever to this land. Another amazing meeting in an underground club in London dates back to 1967.

At that time Emily was known as the “psychedelic student” and the English newspapers recounted how, one evening, she was dancing with a friend of the same age Anjelica Huston, while a young emerging band that was slowly conquering the musical scene was performing on stage: Pink Floyd «I was dancing, they were playing – she tells us – Syd and I spoke to each other, there was nothing else. He was a fantastic poet, a delicious creature. He wrote this song after a dream in which I appeared».

A dream - she says – produced by a heady mix of creative genius, drugs and poetry.  Emily tries but misunderstands / She's often inclined to borrow / Somebody's dreams till tomorrow / There is no other day / Let's try it another way / You'll loose your mind and play / Free games today / See Emily play / Soon after dark Emily cries / Gazing through trees in sorrow / Hardly a sound till tomorrow / Put on a gown that touches the ground / Float on a river / For ever and ever / Emily, Emily The video in black and white, that became very famous, shows a young girl running through a forest and in the empty rooms of a palace, flees or plays in a spectral, rarefied and visionary atmosphere zig-zagging among the trees. She has long black hair like Emily. It’s actually Emily as she appears in Syd’s dream, transfigured in a perpetual flight. Elusive like she appeared that night, but grasped and crystallized for ever in the song. It was a biography of Pink Floyd, “Saucerful of secrets” by Nicholas Schaffner, that revealed the identity of Emily in 1992, reconstructed by cross-checking names and stories like a great jigsaw puzzle that was pieced together over time.

Today Emily Young opens her eyes wide, as she reconstructs the pindaric flights of dreams She was a music icon, but meanwhile She became an artist, quite famous, auctioned in UK. In Great Britain She found fame, but, suddenly She felt the craving of the peace of this little world and left everything.. «In London I had too much of distraction, I'm fine now, beacuse I'm in touch with nature, wind and birds». In her convent stone is sovereign. It marks her days, it is the lady of all, its privileged interlocutor. Calm and immobile, its immobility is a wisdom that spans the centuries and «tells us of the millennia, the air, water, earthquakes and volcanoes. It was unacceptable to me not to be in communication with nature and not to put my thoughts into stone», Emily tells us, for whom art also contains a political message. «Man with his arrogance is endangering nature, exploiting it badly and not protecting it. But nature is sacred and should be respected. I would like those who observe my sculpture to see this within it, the stillness and my works to succeed in expressing a message of salvation, of stillness and respect».

A stillness that does not imply – any way - solitude and isolation. Her monastery is always swarming with people, assistants, scholars and professors. She welcomes them humble, sociable and smiling. Indeed one of her aspirations is to open the convent to the world – with exhibitions and concerts – to show that with art it is possible to achieve pacification between man and nature. «Please, if you can, write it», she asks. Her son, a London musician in the Penguin orchestra who inherited his father’s talent, might perform soon in Batignano. In this way music would become sovereign once again, evoking the Pollock’s magical atmospheres or the legendary genius of Syd, who made a muse of her. (Translated by Sharon Braithwaite)