Young was sometimes labelled a conceptual artist, due to a generative approach that clusters diverse objects, materials, mediums, and ideas to achieve its expression. She differed from such artists, however, in her commitment to workmanship, materiality, and leaving evidence of ritualistic, labor-intensive processes such as industrial fabrication and needlecraft. writers described her art, variously, as challenging and visceral, unsettling, and autobiographical, emotional and haunting. The apparatuses drew on a vocabulary of forms derived from positions of the human body (seated, standing, etc.) and recalled hospital gurneys, operating tables, dunking and electric chairs, confessionals or coffin/cradles. Writers interpreted the installation and mysterious, ritual-like performance—which included cutting Young out of a cocoon-like dress—as a satirical subversion of everyday rituals expressing the horror of confinement and repetition. Young's body-related art also included paintings and fabricated objects, such as clothing made to look like flesh, mannequin-like figures and prosthetics.
Nature-related installations, sculpture, drawings (1998–2020) During a 1998 residency at the
Ucross Foundation—a working ranch—Young began incorporating images of nature, displacing some of her characteristic themes, such as the fragility and pathos of human experience onto animals and plants. Young's embroidered drawings of the late 2000s were described as balancing finely wrought craft technique and rigorous conceptual underpinnings. Working with and into freighted, found objects of Americana (flags, deer targets, stuffed animals), she offered both humor—a coat sewn from stuffed animal pelts, including ear flaps and plastic eyes or locusts and rats stitched onto old farming magazine covers—and social critique, as in
Balmy Birds (2006), an upside-down American flag whose embroidered black birds conveyed a sense of political anxiety and chaos. Young's later installations,
Freed of The Tie Between Root and Soil (Fellows of Contemporary Art, 2017) and "Of Blood and Dirt" (PØST, 2017), explore the cycle of life and mortality through motifs of landscape and nature, the body, blood, and earth. ==Recognition==