You can download my catalogue essay on Emily Allchurch's latest work Urban Chiaroscuro, based on Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons here: Urban_Chiaroscuro.pdf This work will be on show this Autumn at Frost and Reed in St James, London.
The image shown here is Urban Chiaroscuro #4 Rome. Click on the thumbnail for a larger version. The original is a transparancy mounted on a lightbox.
The text only of my catalogue essay is below. You can also see the images on Emily's website and download the press release here.
Re-Imagined Prisons
By 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 are 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 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 Imaginary Prisons, an enigmatic series of
etchings that has been admired by creators as diverse as Aldous Huxley
and M.C. Escher - Huxley described them 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, and a complete image may involve the seamless
integration of hundreds of parts. Urban Chiaroscuro #5: Rome,
for instance, is composed from multiple images of Mussolini's fascist
architecture, an ancient bridge, a contemporary street sign, and so on.
In one sense, then, nothing here is invented. Everything is consciously
chosen. The framework is Piranesi's; the imagery is documentary,
collected and composed from the real world. This technique of visual
transposition, like a strict poetic rhyme scheme, sets the parameters
within which Allchurchâ's own creativity emerges.
The effect is uncanny. The images are familiar yet strange. Those
who know the Piranesi originals will recognise the organisation that
masks the details of construction; those who donât, will recognise
present-day elements, yet be drawn into these incongruous womb-like
spaces that nevertheless have an air of menace. They are scenes in
which a murder or a mugging might have taken place: apparently
deserted, but observed from afar by unseen authorities who are too
distant or unconcerned to intervene. The presence of surveillance
cameras suggests that something bad might happen. The scale is unclear.
Steps lead somewhere, but where? Windows are barred with grilles. Light
from elsewhere suggests there might be a way out, another exit, but
only for those who are prepared to run, their footsteps echoing up high
into the vaulted atrium.
These spaces are not completely devoid of human presence: within
some a tiny figure can be found â a man kneeling praying in the inside
of a mosque, the artist's own reflection in a curved mirror as she
photographs the scene, a blurred figure striding quickly away from
danger, tiny figures of workmen in a lift. In all seven there is some
trace of humanity, a shadow if not a person. But the architecture and
the space dominate and there is nothing reassuring about discovering
that you are not alone here.
Within the strict formal architectural space and the constraints of
Piranesi's structures, Allchurch places elements with contemporary
resonance which can be decoded one by one: the cameras and mirrors,
modern signs and graffiti and other contemporary details gradually
become apparent as the eye travels around the created space. This is a
trope drawn from the frontispiece of Piranesi's work where the title is
carved into the prison wall. In Allchurch's interpretations, the viewer
is drawn into the enclosing space by light, by perspective and by the
desire to explore and make sense of the incongruities of structure. The
scale of the pieces encourages us to enter within the frame and
discover the depth and detail, to imagine the tactile qualities of the
space.
Each of the photographic elements has an overt meaning; nothing is
arbitrary. In one sense they are composite documentary records of the
artist's journey around a particular city in pursuit of the jigsaw
pieces that will complete her mapped image. She compresses a journey
around a city into a single scene. Allchurch works on one picture at a
time, collecting the urban details and angles that will complete the
puzzle, even dreaming about entering the spaces that Piranesi invented.
But behind this manifest content, and the consciously chosen symbols,
there are hints of latent fears, terror even. It is not far-fetched to
say that Piranesi's subject wasn't so much architecture but the psyche.
This is a theatre of the mind with its jumbled symbolic content.
Archways, tunnels, pillars and bollards have obvious sexual
connotations for the Freudian.
As well as having the quality of interpretable dreams - Piranesis
and Allchurch's - these imaginary prisons are also the stages on which
a nightmare might unfold. At an autobiographical level, it is
significant that in a previous series the artist also engaged with fear
â there in a much more straightforward filmic mode she documented
ominous urban landscapes, often at dusk, pedestrian spaces with only
one way out. This fear was not an abstract one: some of the emotional
charge of both series comes from a real memory of danger. Twilight for
her is always both beautiful and menacing. She was understandably drawn
to Piranesi's etchings which provide visual metaphors for a state of
mind that resonates with her own. She has to dare herself to enter some
of the darker recesses of sites she wants to photograph to complete an
image, challenging her own sense of danger. The power of these works,
then, resides in their dreamlike construction of uncomfortable terrain
as much as in the implied meanings of their elements.
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. London, for instance, is characterised by the yellowish light
from the bricks of the East End; but also the metallic bluish tones of
the Jubilee Line's harsh lighting from which parts of Urban Chiaroscuro #2: London is composed. Rome's light is tinged with a warmer orange, or as in Urban Chiaroscuro #5:
Rome, the white light reflected from Mussolini's version of modernism.
As a series, the seven palettes of the seven images complement each
other in their tonal modulations. 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.
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