Emily Allchurch, born 1974 in Jersey, Channel Islands, lives and works in Hastings, East Sussex. She trained as a sculptor, receiving a First Class (Hons.) degree in Fine Art from the Kent Institute of Art & Design, Canterbury (now UCA) in 1996, and an MA from the Royal College of Art in 1999, where she began working with photography as a material. Since then she has exhibited regularly in solo and group shows in the UK and internationally.
Allchurch uses photography and digital collage to reconstruct, or closely reference, Old Master paintings and prints to create contemporary narratives. Her starting point is an intensive encounter with a city or place, to absorb an impression and gather a huge image library. From this resource, hundreds of photographs are selected and meticulously spliced together to create a seamless new ‘fictional’ space. Each artwork re-presents this journey, compressed into a single scene. The resulting photographic collages have a resonance with place, history and culture, and deal with the passage of time and the changes to a landscape, fusing contemporary life with a sense of history.
Her works are held in public and private collections worldwide. In 2025, the British Museum acquired a full set of the Tokyo Story series as archival pigment prints, whilst in 2023 the Royal Academy of Arts in London acquired a lightbox edition of ‘Grand Tour ll: Homage to Soane (after Gandy)’ and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy also acquired this work along with its companion piece, ‘Grand Tour: In Search of Soane (after Gandy)’. A complete set of her Tokyo Story series is also held in the permanent collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, with a further set in the collection of Fidelity in Tokyo. In 2020, the Museum of London acquired a lightbox version of ‘Babel London (after Breugel)’ to go on permanent display, when it opens at its new site in West Smithfield towards the end of 2026.
In Summer 2018, she had a solo show, Visions of Architectural Fancy, at the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, and in 2015 her solo show, Emily Allchurch: In the Footsteps of a Master, at Manchester Art Gallery, also toured to the Djanogly Art Gallery in Nottingham. Her Albert Square, Manchester (after Valette) lightbox, was created specially for the Manchester Art Gallery to coincide with this exhibition, and crowd-funded via the Art Fund’s ‘Art Happens’ scheme, and is held in the Gallery’s permanent collection.
