About Paul Devon Young

Artist | Ceramicist | Sculptor | Painter | Researcher

Paul Devon Young is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans ceramics, sculpture, installation, painting, and material research. He is the founder of Amaga Ceramics and the creator of innovative projects such as Mineralscape and Cobology.

Based in Devon, Paul has spent over a decade researching and collecting natural pigments, clays, and materials from the Devon landscape. His work is deeply rooted in the geology, textures, and colours of the land and coast, often incorporating local soils, granites, ball clays, and aquatic minerals into his sculptures, paintings, and ceramic forms.

Paul’s sculptural works—often life-sized, freestanding, and figurative—are part of what he calls The Collective, a series that explores contemporary and environmental issues, including displacement, war, cultural erasure, food sustainability, and neurodiversity.

His Cobology project pushes the boundaries of traditional cob-building by developing Modified Cob Mixes (M.C.M.)suitable for kiln construction and ceramic firing. Through this process, he has built experimental kilns and created a new sculptural clay body sourced entirely from local materials.

Paul also works extensively in painting, approaching his canvases with a sculptor’s eye. His paintings are deeply textured and physical, often mixed with natural minerals and pigments, drawing inspiration from cosmology, geology, and the unseen layers of the universe.

A significant part of Paul’s creative life is shaped by his experience of neurodiversity and autism, which has given him a unique sensitivity to materials, process, and detail. His life and work are explored in the film Elemental, which follows his creative journey over the course of a year, and in his two published books:

• Equatorial Derbyshire – A reflection on his youth in a residential special school.

• Imbecile via Autism: Reversed Alchemy – A personal exploration of autism, identity, and survival.

For Paul, creativity is not just an artistic pursuit—it is a way of understanding and navigating the world, where earth, fire, and form become a language of their own.

“The land, the body, the elements, the cosmos—they all leave marks. My job is to find them and give them form.”