With few prospects other than working in the factory towns, Young lied about his age to attend art college at the age of fifteen. Had he not done so, he would have most likely moved to the streets of London and died. He moved to the capital five years later and caught the attention of photographer Christos Raftopoulos, whom he assisted for several years. Raftopoulos introduced Young to another side of himself, building him his own darkroom, taking him to the opera, showing him the limits of his life did not need to confine him or his work. It was during this time—still rough in nature and occasionally homeless—he photographed the early gigs of Bauhaus, R.E.M., and The Smiths. His innate eye for movement landed him photoshoots for magazines and eventually his first record sleeve cover for the 1986 album Faith by George Michael.

Young continued to photograph celebrities and direct music videos, eventually leading him to the United States. The rock star aesthetic he had brandished in his photography lent itself to his earliest screen prints that followed in the 2000s. His first series, Pig Portraits, shown in Los Angeles in 2003, collected the infamous mugshots (real and staged) of celebrities awash in fame and monochrome but also restrained as a result of their actions. In his following series, Dirty Pretty Things, he began to incorporate his popular use of diamond dust. The glam shots of cultural icons, glittering in pulverized diamonds, embodied the lusts and aspirations of their eras.

In the summer of 2009, Young went to the Greek island of Ithaca. Raftopoulos, who owned a home there, invited him to stay. The island served as a refuge. It led Young, who left behind his past and the expectations of his work on the shores of the mainland, to reclaim the feeling of isolation which had hounded him all his life. There, amongst ancient olive groves, he drenched himself in goat’s blood procured from a local butcher and pressed his body against linen. It was an outrageous performance meant for no one but himself. Like a blasphemous reimagining of the Turin Shroud, this feral and highly personal act marked a seminal turn. It began what would become an ongoing and visceral conversation between his body, memory, and the natural world. That conversation, however, was abruptly cut short the following year when Young contracted the H1N1 virus that put him into a coma for over a week. He nearly died. When he regained consciousness, he had to relearn to read and write, and he had forgotten the color green. When one of his children brought him a book of animals, he could hardly believe polar bears actually existed on our planet.

What has followed from Young’s illness is the maturing of that conversation and a preoccupation with a central dilemma: the exact edge where boylike wonder falls into violent truth. In his first series of paintings after surviving his illness, Young pressed canvases down into pools of red shellac, letting the resin drip, smear, and splatter like wounds. In Helter Skelter, he repeatedly screen printed images taken from the Rolling Stones Altamont Free Concert to the point of abstraction, echoing the infernal, disorienting frenzy that ended in the death of Meredith Hunter and the era of free love altogether. The counterculture of Young’s youth, once a source of inspiration, was now also a source of trauma. In his wake, he even left behind his own bootprints. A year later, in his series Only Anarchists are Pretty, he cut out pornographic images of bound women and arranged them like the brutal machinations of a mechanic lining the walls of his garage with pinups. These crowded arrangements were given the names of the council estates he remembered in Northern England, places like Thorntree and The Lache, which had once threatened to overcrowd and entrap him.