Lucy Bell Gallery presents the first local exhibition of client Emily Allchurch’s series, Closer to Home.
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.
Produced as Lambda C-type prints and Duratran prints 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.
In her trademark referencing to Old Master prints and paintings, she has adopted the ‘Oban’ portrait format and near/far composition techniques used by Utagawa Hiroshige in his series ‘One Hundred Famous Views of Edo’ (1856-58), a love letter to his home city of Tokyo. However, in a departure from recent work, the compositions are her own, with the twelve resulting images forming a portrait of the East Sussex landscape throughout a calendar year.
Whilst some scenes capture more obviously aesthetic vistas, like the South Downs, others find beauty in the everyday, such as blossom flowering on an urban estate, and the unfurling of new weeds in spring. Both the cherry blossom and Japanese knotweed in these works offer lighthearted references to their Japanese inspirational origins.
Allchurch follows in the footsteps of a rich tradition of artists drawn to the beauty of the Sussex coast. A couple of the works reference specific paintings, namely her composition for May, which captures the same view of Fairlight immortalised in William Holman Hunt’s 1852 painting ‘Our English Coasts (‘Strayed Sheep’)’ which is in the Tate Collection, and her view of Beachy Head for August, which echoes that painted by Eric Ravillious, some 80 years ago.
Closer to Home at Lucy Bell Gallery
11 February – 26 March, 2023
46 Norman Rd,
Saint Leonards-on-sea
TN38 0EJ
Opening times:
Thurs – Sun, 11:00am – 4:00pm
Saturday: 10am – 5:00pm
About Emily Allchurch
Emily Allchurch, b.1974, is an internationally renowned artist, who has exhibited widely both in the UK and internationally, including Pingyao International Photography Festival (China), Karin Weber Gallery (HK), Minneapolis Institute of Art (USA), Tokaido Hiroshige Museum (Japan), Sir John Soane’s Museum (London), Manchester Art Gallery, Museum Villa Rot (Germany) and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy (France), establishing her as one of the UK’s top contemporary artists.
Living and working in Hastings since 2015, Emily originally trained as a sculptor at the Kent Institute of Design in Canterbury, before transitioning to work with photography during her MA at the Royal College of Art (1997-99). 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. Peppered with topical markers spotted in the environment: signage, advertising, graffiti, CCTV surveillance, detritus etc, they form a snapshot of our times.
See more work by Emily Allchurch
