About The Artist

Emily Allchurch’s series “Urban Chiaroscuro” is a homage to one of art history’s darkest and most haunting works, Giovanni Batista Piranesi’s “Imaginary Prisons”, a series of etchings of prisons,  described by Aldous Huxley as ‘the strangest and in some ways the most beautiful of Piranesi’s etchings’.

Allchurch has painstakingly collaged found elements on the visual structure of each of seven plates: every detail is a contemporary photograph she has made for this purpose, each image consists of between 300-400 images taken in Paris, London and Rome, then painstakingly put together in Photoshop over a period of two months, with meticulous care resulting in seamless images that are both baffling and extraordinary. Photographic illustrations only go so far in communicating the visual impact of the series. Each picture is mounted as a transparency on a lightbox. Where Piranesi’s sombre etchings seemed to be moving in the direction of pure blackness, Allchurch introduces colour and light. Each city – Rome, London, Paris – has peculiar qualities of luminosity for her that determine the palette for the images associated with that place. Light and colour provide a note of optimism that is lacking in Piranesi’s dark vision, but this optimism is tinged with contemporary uncertainty and a sense of foreboding.