This Place in Time (2026): A Percentage for Art Commission, Northern Quarter, St Helier, Jersey
Digital photomontage triptych mural, printed onto waterjet-cut ceramic tiles.
Commissioned by Chris Clifford of Private & Public Gallery, St Helier, Jersey, for Andium Homes, and project-managed by Siobhann McLeod, to portray site-specific references to the geography, geology and history of the area upon which the Northern Quarter affordable housing development is built, these three large-format colourful digital ceramic panels are intended to make a positive contribution to the visual enhancement of the site’s pedestrian route from east to south.
The imagery in these artworks traces the story of the site through time: from alluvial layers of mud, shale, diamines, shells and a buried dolmen, to medieval monks and their apple orchards, marshland with its phosphorescent gas, the C18th and C19th expansion of St. Helier, and the establishment of the nearby gas works – a well known local landmark until it was demolished in the 1990s.
Although the artwork is mounted onto solid masonry panels set into a brickwork arcade, the tracery of the tile joints inscribed around many of the individual elements in the images, often interrupting the regular 30 x 60 cm tile grid, is intended to be reminiscent of stained glass. This additional feature was achieved by intricate waterjet cutting of individually printed ceramic tiles, painstakingly carried out by Digital Ceramics Custom Tiles of Stoke-on-Trent, pioneering for Allchurch an entirely new process for the presentation of her work in an external public art setting.