'The Six Seasons' - an exhibition by Emily Allchurch

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 created were an exploration of man’s relationship and interactions with nature. Allchurch’s archival prints reimagine Bruegel’s works as assemblages of thousands of contemporary photographs. 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 the same.

Emily Allchurch, born 1974 in Jersey, Channel Islands, lives and works in Hastings, East Sussex. She trained as a sculptor, receiving a First Class (Hons.) degree in Fine Art from the Kent Institute of Art & Design, Canterbury (now UCA) in 1996, and an MA from the Royal College of Art in 1999, where she began working with photography as a material. Since then, she has exhibited regularly in solo and group shows in the UK and internationally. 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. Emily will be selecting works from the Upton collection that have informed her practice as an artist. These will displayed in the French Room.