The Jersey born artist Emily Allchurch, who was educated at Jersey College for Girls before completing her MA studies at the Royal College of Art in London, has achieved one of the highest accolades in the art world.
Emily has had the complete set of her archival pigment prints from her ‘Tokyo Story’ series acquired by the British Museum for their permanent collection. Emily now lives in Hastings, East Sussex, where she works in photography and digital media and she exhibits regularly in solo and group shows in the UK, internationally and here in Jersey with Private & Public Gallery.
The artist 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, to absorb an impression and gather a huge image library. From this resource, hundreds of photographs are selected and meticulously spliced together to create a seamless new ‘fictional’ space. Each artwork re-presents this journey, compressed into a single scene. The resulting photographic collages have a resonance with place, history and culture, and deal with the passage of time and the changes to a landscape, fusing contemporary life with a sense of history.
Talking about the British Museum acquisition Emily said: “I am delighted and honoured to share the news that the British Museum have acquired a complete set of ‘Tokyo Story’ for their permanent collection. Knowing that these works are in the custodianship of such an important institution, along with the original woodblock prints by Hiroshige, is thrilling and a very special moment in my career”.
Paying homage to Utagawa Hiroshige’s (1797-1858) last great work, the ‘One Hundred Famous Views of Edo’ (1856-58), Emily’s series transposes his distinctive woodblock techniques of abstraction, vivid colouring and composition into contemporary digital-photographic collages of Tokyo and one of the works will form part of the Museum’s upcoming show, ‘Hiroshige – artist of the open road’ which opens on 1st May and runs until 7th September 2025.
Chris Clifford, Director & Curator of Private & Public Gallery said: “This is an incredible accolade for Emily and one for which she should be immensely proud. It also gives me great please to announce that to coincide with British Museum exhibition Emily will be showcasing works from the Tokyo Story series at our gallery from 16th May as part of a group exhibition titled Big in Japan with works by Takashi Murakami, Yayoi Kusama, Yoshimoto Nara, Damien Hirst, Charlie Haydn Taylor and Russell Layton”.
The series of prints were first launched at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation (London) in 2011, with a further two prints created by revisiting the artists Japanese image library during the pandemic in 2020.
Over the years they have been shown extensively, including at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (USA), The Japan Society Gallery (New York), Tokaido Hiroshige Museum (Japan), Manchester Art Gallery (UK), Djanogly Art Gallery (Nottingham), and the Tyler Print Institute (Singapore).
Dr Alfred Haft, Project Curator in the Japanese Section of the Department of Asia at the British Museum said: “The British Museum is thrilled to have acquired the complete series Tokyo Story by Emily Allchurch. Each work inventively refers to a major print design from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo by Utagawa Hiroshige, one of Japan’s leading landscape artists, while simultaneously offering a glimpse into daily life in modern Japan. We look forward to featuring Emily’s engaging work this summer in our exhibition, Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road, and in the Japanese Galleries”.
Main picture: Emily Allchurch presenting the complete set of her archival prints from the Tokyo Story series to the curators and archivists at the British Museum in London.
