Allison Gretchko
Degree: MFA
University: Royal College of Art
Graduation Year: 2024
New Blood Art Commentary
Allison Gretchko, a recent Royal College of Art graduate, is a photographer whose work explores themes of care, consumption, and memory. Through the use of analogue photography and natural light, she creates images imbued with a tactile, nostalgic quality. Her work examines the connections between people, places, and the objects we inherit, focusing on the fluid and ephemeral nature of photographic images.
Gretchko’s process embraces imperfection, using film to capture subtle, atmospheric scenes shaped by light and shadow. This approach gives her work a timeless quality, evoking memories and emotions through a romantic interplay of texture and tone.
In her project Who drinks your tears?, Gretchko turns her lens on a generational family home, exploring domestic spaces as repositories of shared memory and materiality. Her photographs reflect the psychological weight of inheritance, presenting scenes of light and life shaped by absence and presence. Her work invites viewers to reflect on the transient yet enduring connections that shape our understanding of time, place, and belonging.
Artist Statement
My artistic practice focuses on the interconnectedness of people and place through habitual and temporal representations. Focusing in on artifacts, inheritances, personal archives, and memory to explore threads connected to care and consumption in intimate and domestic settings. My work examines the ideology of factual fluidity in relation to the photographic image, and the duality that shares with human memory across space and time. I seek to uncover intimate relationships and habits that exist both physically and psychologically in site-specific locations in order to bring the private sphere into the public gaze.
Relying heavily on psychogeography and intuition to direct my movement, I embrace the nuances that analogue photography provides to the unpredictability of the environment. Natural sunlight is my methodological tool to uncover and dissect the hidden ecosystems that interconnect people and places. I document what the sun chooses to fall upon, capturing the beams of light as its own figure, acting as an embodiment of space, movement, and memory. Examining the inherited ecosystems that connect collective experiences to private environments through the ephemerality of material and objects, I touch on both the spatial and temporal.
Duality is important to my research, especially regarding the fickleness of image-making and memories as tools of fictionalizing reality. Photographs, similar to memories, never tell the complete story. My photographs operate within this friction, inviting the viewer to decipher the innate intimacy and storytelling for themselves. I ask the viewer to confront the consequences of intimacy made open to the public gaze.
I currently reside in London, having completed a MFA in Arts & Humanities (2024) and an MA in Photography (2023) from the Royal College of Art after working for nearly a decade as an in-house commercial photographer.
Competitions, Prizes & Awards
(2024) New Blood Art Emerging Art Prize 2024 Nominee
