Emily Allchurch

Emily Allchurch, born in the Channel Islands in 1974, divides her time between London and her home in Hastings, East Sussex. She trained as a sculpture, 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. 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. 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.

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.

2018 Architectural Visions of a Grand Tour.

Sir John Soane Museum, London
Architectural Capricci.

Galerie Rothamel, Frankfurt
2017 Project Space.

Galerie Rothamel, Erfurt
2015 Emily Allchurch, In the Footstep of a Master.

Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham
Emily Allchurch, In the Footstep of a Master.

Manchester
2013/14 Tokyo Story / After Hiroshige, Tokaido Hiroshige Museum, Shizuoka, Japan
2011 Tokyo Story. Diemar Noble Photography, London
Tokyo Story. Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, London
2008 Urban Chiaroscuro. Galeria Galica, Milan
2007 Urban Chiaroscuro. Frost and Reed Contemporary. London
2006 Emily Allchurch, A Retrospective. Frost & Reed Contemporary, London
Model City. Galica Arte Contemporanea, Milan
Model City. Alberta College of Art & Design, Calgary. Canada
2004/05 Settings. The Blue Gallery, London
2003 Setting. Galica Arte Contemporanea, Milan
2002 Light Sensitive. East73rdgallery, London
Exposure. Standpoint Gallery, London
A Hill with a View. Orleans House Galllery, Twickenham
2001 On The Horizon. Royal London Hospital