Elliott Young is one of East London’s true characters. At just 26 she is fast establishing herself as one of the most talented ones-to-watch in the art world, as well as being a fashion tastemaker, a well-known party-starter and tattooist to the stars. Born in Norfolk but living above Hackney’s famous Cat and Mutton pub, she’s the daughter of two traditional British tattooists (she did her first tattoo on her dad aged 3) who are now divorced but continue as rivals in their trade; her father, a mod founder of the Breckland Buckeneers, and her mother a pagan white witch with a pet monkey and a taxidermist fiancé named Pig. It’s safe to say Miss Elliott Young is cut from a different cloth.

 Her awards and achievements within her subjects are unarguably impressive, initially earning a B.A in Fine Art at Norwich School of Art, Young then applied to Prince’s Drawing School of traditional arts for an M.A, winning a place with a full bursary and studio within the Tea Buildings, London. A year spent intensively drawing earned her the overall prizewinner of the year and ignited her love for putting pencil to pad. Marrying together the conceptual skills learnt on her B.A with a newfound gauge of aesthetics, Young’s attention drew towards rendering. She became interested in how to distil and re-conceptualise an image, taking debauched pornographic scenes and inverting the interpretation, with the participation of the viewer playing an integral part in her work. Winner of the Dover Street Art prize in 2006 and shortlisted for the Celeste Art prize in the same year as well as ‘07, Young has gone on to set up a Young Artists Programme with alumni from the Prince’s Drawing School and continues to teach upon the scheme as well as tutoring delinquent children in Hertfordshire within their gallery programme.

Young was also inspired to pick up the family trade and with the streets of Hackney littered with many tattoo-clad scenesters she didn’t find it hard to gain people for her project. Armed with a B.A, an M.A and a tattoo gun, Young set about recreating her work on these living canvases using both traditional and UV inks, the UV parts only visible in the bearer’s trendy night haunts. Having already exhibited her work at Liverpool Bienial, Seven Seven Gallery and Windsor Castle, Elliott Young is now working on new material following her Thick & Thin show last autumn.

"It was the compassion he holds within his lines and his draughtmanship that lured me into his work and it was only after that embrace that I realised what they were depicting; resplendent scenes of debauchery and vulgarity. It is this contradiction between the content of the subject matter and the rendering that is of interest to me, the beauty within the abject," says Young.

Once the images are discovered within 'Informe' the viewing becomes a voyeuristic playground. And yet they are easy to miss, their absence easily assumed. The viewer has to take part and interact to gain anything at all.

In '100 Wet Nights of Sodom' the images are seductively ambiguous, the alluring glow leads you to embrace the piece then the realisation of the content strikes.

It is this heavier emphasis placed on the viewer's role in the work that is inspiring, the necessity to make the viewer work for the art, to experience the work, to interact and perform alongside and within the work, or conversely just to walk on past.

It is not only the subversion of the initially exploitative, pornographic image to something diffuse and gently erotic but also a subversion of the viewers role from someone who is presented with a fiction to someone who must go in search of the truth.  

In Young's stain series 'Informe' and urine documentation '100 Wet Nights of Sodom,' it is only upon the viewer's own invitation that they feel violated. 

Within it he blushed vieginal white page it is only an inqusitiv eye that shall find the images. Beyond the antural eyeline exist a series of marks that gather to create an image with a distilled yet pornographic sentiment. The images Young uses are sourced from material with an inate capacity to shock, and yet within the rendering it exists as somethig else. It is the eroticism of the drawn line, as eulogised by Hans Bellmer, which led Young to make this current body of work.