The Marks of Man

Emily Allchurch & Nigel Warburton "Beyond the real, historical prisons of too much tidiness and those where anarchy engenders the hell of physical and moral chaos there lie yet other prisons, no less terrible for being fantastic and unembodied---the metaphysical prisons, whose seat is within the mind, whose walls are made of nightmare and incomprehension, whose chains are anxiety and their racks a sense of personal and even generic guilt." Aldous Huxley on Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons . Emily Allchurch's new series, Urban Chiaroscuro , is a photographic homage to Giovanni Battista Piranesi's (1729-78) darkest work; but it is also an exploration of her own imagination. The starting point for each picture is a specific plate from the eighteenth century architect's sinister Carceri d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons) , first published 1749-50, an enigmatic series of etchings that has been admired b...

Emily Allchurch, Xavier Bray and Minna Moore Ede When the eighteenth-century vedute painter, Canaletto, employed his camera obscura to paint the Grand Canal in Venice it was not only topographical accuracy he was seeking but also an aid to framing and editing his compositions. The camera obscura, a small box which rendered the three-dimensional world into two dimensions, had been used by artists since the sixteenth-century. According to the contemporary painter David Hockney, its use was far more widespread than is admitted by art historians today, employed by countless artists over the centuries as their ‘secret weapon’. Whether or not Hockney is correct, the way in which artists construct their images has always been a point of interest for their audience. It is this that is so compelling about the work of Emily Allchurch, for in an innovative reversal of this way of rationalising the world, she uses the Old Masters as her own camera obscura. Exploiting celebrated compos...