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 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 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. 

Closer to home:

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Throughout 2020 and 2021, whilst largely confined to her home county of East Sussex due to the Coronavirus pandemic, Emily Allchurch took photographs on her daily walks in the local countryside through the changing seasons. This has inspired a new collection of landscapes, ‘Closer to Home’, not only in celebration of the natural world, but also as a reminder of its precarious fragility.

The works explore themes of landscape management and control, the threat from development, coastal erosion, invasive plant species and detritus, and how we interact with the landscape through tourism and recreation.

Closer to Home presentation: https://www.emilyallchurch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Emily-Allchurch-Closer-to-Home-Presentation-21Mb.pdf

Tower of Babel:

The ‘Tower of Babel’ is a compelling motif with which to portray a city from a contemporary perspective and is a recurring theme in Allchurch’s work. The construction allows for multiple viewpoints and layers of history to be represented within a single structure. 

As with all her works, Babel Britain is peppered with topical markers spotted in the environment: signage, graffiti, property developers’ advertising hyperbole, street art, and protest banners  – all of which help to reinforce a message of political and economic uncertainty, as well as growing inequality of wealth.

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Image analysis:

In this image, you can see multiple buildings positioned into one big complex. All the buildings seem to be from different locations because of the different features and colours. The use of having stormy clouds create a great effect on the image by making the image seem medieval and dark. These images could be made to try and present the future of Britain having buildings positioned together due to lack of housing. The image has a lot of small details throughout such as structures in the background, graffiti, protest banners, advertisements and street art. I really like the way how such a small image is filled with lots of hidden and mysterious details everywhere you look.