Grand Tour II: Homage to Soane (after Gandy), 2017

Emily Allchurch (b. 1974)

RA Collection: Art

Emily Allchurch's lightbox re-imagines Joseph Michael Gandy ARAs fantastical panorama of Sir John Soane RA's unrealised projects, Architectural Visions of Early Fancy (1820). Allchurch toured the UK photographing examples of neoclassical architecture that were contemporary to Soane. Using the resulting images as a ‘kit of parts’, she digitally assembled the buildings in Gandy’s painting, using a dome from one building, a portico from another, and so on, to create the appearance that Soane’s designs had in fact been built.

These composite constructions are set into a hybrid Arcadian landscape, combining English country gardens with the rugged crags of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh and Scafell Pike in the Lake District. Contemporary visitors are shown engaging with the fictional environment, recording their experiences with modern technology.

This piece was exhibited in the RA Summer Exhibition in 2017 and is a companion piece to another lightbox by Allchurch, based on another of Gandy’s epic watercolours, in that case showing all of Soane’s projects that were actually built.