About
Cybèle Young is a Toronto-based artist and author.
Cybèle Young is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture and books, experimental video and stop-motion animation, performance and participatory projects. Her work, rooted in decades of collaboration with Japanese paper, explores transformation, ritual, and scale — from intricate paper miniatures to kinetic installations and surreal film vignettes. Drawing from Dada, Fluxus, and sacred traditions, she creates poetic systems that animate stillness, reimagine repetition, and invite attentive play. Her recent projects bridge the hand-crafted and time-based, inviting new modes of interaction between materials, machines, and memory.
Since graduating from sculpture and printmaking at the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1995, Cybèle has been showing her work in galleries around the world, such as New York, LA, Miami, London, Stockholm, Japan, Singapore, Korea and across Canada.
Since her first solo show 15 years ago, she has mounted over 20 solo exhibitions, and has been included in over 30 group shows and numerous annual art fairs.
She has won over thirty grants and awards including a recent 2 month fellowship to discover Japan and its paper making culture, and a six month Canada Council studio residency in Paris.
Cybèle has received critical acclaim in such publications as Art in America, The New York Times, NYLON, Wallpaper, Canadian Art Magazine, Globe and Mail, Elle, Toronto Star, NOW and MacLeans.
Her work has also been featured online in such publications as Buzzfeed, Colossal, and Jocundist.
(see 'Press' for a complete list of press releases)
Her work resides in major collections around the world – including OMERS, Ernst and Young, BMO, Gryphon, Canadian Foreign Affairs and the Canada Council Art Bank – and in the private homes of collectors such as Ben Stiller, Noah Baumbach, and Christian Louboutin.
She has a permanent public work installed with the Toronto Transit Commission at Yonge and St. Clair (Deer Park Crescent).
She works in a diverse range of mediums, but always at the root is a close connection to the hand, to paper and to the drawn line. Cybèle has both written and illustrated 13 picture books to date.
Her books garner starred reviews and numerous awards. Most notably, she won the Governor General’s Award for her book ‘Ten Birds’ in 2011, and the TD book award for ‘Nancy Knows’ in 2015.
Cybèle is represented by Forum Gallery in New York and Los Angeles.
Artist Statement
Cybèle Young a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, printmaking, stop-motion animation, experimental film, and performance. For over three decades, she has worked in close collaboration with Japanese paper — cutting, folding, ritualizing, and animating it — as both material and metaphor. Her work explores transformation, rhythm, and the space between the absurd and the sacred.
Rooted in the handmade and expanded through time-based media, her evolving body of work includes kinetic paper sculptures, motorized machines, and surreal vignettes captured in film. From miniature one-act plays crafted in paper to immersive installations and performative actions, she explores how scale, repetition, and embodied gesture can shift perception. She is drawn to the poetic logic of systems — whether mechanical, maternal, or ritual — and to the ways in which they unravel, evolve, or endure.
Young’s aesthetic is shaped, for example, by the playfulness of Dada, the provocations of Fluxus, the clarity of Froebel’s kindergarten, and the quiet power of Shinto practices. These influences converge in ongoing projects like *Kamiphony* — a multi-sensory installation of kinetic sculptures, film, and sound — and *Modes of Performance*, a growing archive of artist-designed ritual actions and object-based scores for reflection, movement, and play.
Whether on paper or on screen, in motion or at rest, each piece gestures toward what is ephemeral yet grounded, playful yet precise — always asking how we relate to materials, to each other, and to the unknown.
I acknowledge, and am grateful for, the ongoing support of the
the Toronto Arts Council,
the Ontario Arts Council,
and
the Canada Council for the Arts
