Emily Allchurch

(UK; born 1974)

FLOW 2026

In 2025, Allchurch followed the River Thames over a calendar year, exploring 12 locations along its course, one for each month of the year, from its source in January at Thames Head in the Cotswolds, to the mouth at Southend-on-Sea in December. Each location, spaced at around 20-mile intervals, was chosen to add a different facet to the story of the Thames today. The resulting twelve scenes in FLOW are her own compositions, but as in some previous works, take inspiration from Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856-8) in their vertical format, sense of place, and use of near/far devices. Themes explored include the seasons, flora and fauna, topography, and the use (and abuse) of the river – from leisure activities and power generation to more reckless interventions such as litter and pollution. The artworks in FLOW illustrate the passage of the Thames as it unfolds from the almost timeless pastoral landscape of its upper reaches, via the ultra-managed river banks of London, to the industrialised stretches east of the capital. The works celebrate the natural beauty to be found along the entirety of the river, despite the pressure from human impact.

The Six Seasons (after Bruegel) 2024

In 1565, Bruegel the Elder was commissioned by the Antwerp merchant Nicolas Jongelinck to paint the ‘Seasons’, a series of six paintings following a calendar year in Northern Europe, with each painting representing two months of the year. The paintings Bruegel duly created were, in essence, an exploration of man’s then relationship, and interactions, with nature. The best known of the series, ‘Hunters in the Snow’, records a harsh winter in a period of intense climate change known as the ‘Little Ice Age’ (1

300-1850). Despite the hardship resulting from the bitter conditions and consequent food shortages, the painting illustrates man’s ability to endure and indeed find joy, evident in the games being played on the frozen rivers and ponds.

Allchurch’s new body of work, The Six Seasons, re-imagines Bruegel’s paintings, using assemblages of thousands of contemporary photographs taken in the English landscape. By recreating Bruegel’s paintings with images from today, Emily looks at the central theme of the ‘Seasons’ – man’s relationship to nature and the land – and asks what has changed in the intervening centuries, and what has stayed them same.

Five of Allchurch’s images are based on the surviving paintings that are now distributed across three countries and two continents: The Hunters in the Snow, The Gloomy Day, and The Return of the Herd in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; The Harvest in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and The Haymaking at Lobkowicz Palace, Prague Castle. The sixth painting, however, has long been lost. Allchurch re-imagines the missing painting as ‘The Six Seasons – Late Spring (after Bruegel), “reuniting” it with its companion pieces.

“As we live through our own period of climate change, I wanted to update the series from a contemporary perspective, reflecting on the fragility of nature and the seasons as we have known them, and how our interventions with landscape, mostly through leisure and tourism, are managed and mediated. With its focus on the everyday and ordinary, and a subtle underlying commentary on how we connect with nature and the landscape today, I hope ‘The Six Seasons’ series successfully captures our present moment in time.” 

Previous work

Prices available on request.