Emily Allchurch

Closer to Home (2021)

Throughout 2020 and 2021, whilst largely confined to her home in East Sussex due to the pandemic, Allchurch sought solace in her daily local walks, taking photographs of the townscape and countryside through the changing seasons. This inspired a series of digitally collaged landscapes, that both celebrated her immediate environment while offering 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. Whilst some scenes capture the more obviously aesthetic vistas like the South Downs, others find beauty in the everyday, such as blossom flowering on an urban estate or the unfurling of new weeds in the spring. In her trademark referencing of old master prints and paintings, she has once again - as in Tokyo Story of 2011 - adopted the portrait format and near/far composition technique used by Hiroshige in his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. In a departure from previous work however, the compositions are largely her own and the twelve resulting mages from an extraordinary calendar year form a tender portrait of the East Sussex landscape.

Prices available on request.