Anastasia Young was born in Stirling, Scotland, in 1976. From 1998 to 2001 she followed a BA course in jewellery design at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London, and in 2002-4 studied for her MA in the Department of Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewellery at the Royal College of Art. In 1999 she took part in the BAMS Student Medal Project, and a medal on a spider theme won her an ESG Robinson Charitable Trust prize in the Royal Mint / Royal College of Art medal competition of 2004 (see The Medal, 45 (2004), pp. 99, 103).

Young’s jewellery can be seen in Elizabeth Olver’s The art of jewellery design (2002) and Yvonne Kulogowski’s The earrings book (2003), and has been included in exhibitions in various venues, including New designers at the Business Design Centre, Islington, London (2001 and 2004), the Midora trade fair, Leipzig (2004), Dazzle 04/05 at the National Theatre, London, and the 2005 Goldsmiths’ Craft and Design Council Awards exhibition at Goldsmiths’ Hall, London. Young is currently working on pieces for a solo show of small boxed installations containing scenes from a Spiders’ Laboratory, which is planned for the end of 2006.

The artist writes about her BAMS medal: ‘The subject of this piece has been inspired by the imaginary realm from which all my work originates. In it, scientist-spiders perform complex experiments and collect objects to study. The title, Inventory, alludes to both the act of cataloguing and list-making on the obverse and the invention of new scientific processes represented by experimental notes on the reverse. The medal is therefore part of the documentary evidence that the spiders create – for them, process is everything.’