Emily Allchurch uses photography and digital collage to reconstruct 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. Although also available as prints, presenting the work as lightboxes maximises their theatricality, and creates a window into another world.
Her works are held in private collections worldwide, with a complete set of her Tokyo Story series in the permanent collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In 2015 she had a solo show, Emily Allchurch: In the Footsteps of a Master, at Manchester Art Gallery, which toured to the Djanogly Art Gallery in Nottingham, and in Summer 2018 she had a solo show, Visions of Architectural Fancy, at the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London.
Emily Allchurch, born 1974 in Jersey, Channel Islands, trained as a sculptor, receiving a First Class (Hons.) degree in Fine Art from the Kent Institute of Art & Design – Canterbury 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.
