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Saved by the Whale's Tail, Saved by Art

Call for stories that champion, interrogate and celebrate
how art has saved lives!

Artist Ahmet Öğüt together with Art on the Underground and New Contemporaries are seeking stories about how art has saved lives.

Do you have a story about how art has saved a life?

Submit your story here

Submit your story by 2 June 2025. The most compelling story will be displayed on the London Underground and the submitter will receive an artwork trophy created by Ahmet Öğüt. The call for stories forms part of a major new public artwork that will launch at Stratford station from September 2025. Visit the New Contemporaries website for more information.

Ahmet Öğüt is a sociocultural initiator, artist and lecturer, working across a variety of media, including photography, video, and installation.

Öğüt often uses humour and interventions to offer commentary on serious or pressing social and political issues. His new commission, ‘Saved by the Whale’s Tail, Saved by Art’, explores the role art plays in everyday life.

‘Saved by the Whale’s Tail, Saved by Art’ includes a major art installation at Stratford Underground station which will be unveiled in September 2025, alongside a call out to the public for stories that champion, interrogate and celebrate how art has saved lives. Posters on display across the London Underground network from 2 April – 2 June 2025, are asking the public to submit their stories of how art has saved them.

Öğüt’s commission, which explores the power of art, is inspired by an incident that occurred near Rotterdam in 2020 when a train overran the tracks and was saved by a sculpture of a whale’s tail. With a compelling visual metaphor for the power of art to save lives, the project seeks to uncover many more stories at a time when the arts are radically underfunded and undervalued.

2025 Programme Announcement

Art on the Underground’s programme for 2025 comprises major new works from four contemporary artists. Since its conception in 2000, Art on the Underground has been at the forefront of critically engaged programming that reflects on the changing nature of public space, challenging the idea that public art is fixed.

Through placing trust in artists and the creative process, the programme has a renowned history of commissioning site specific work that speaks to people, places, and histories. 2025 continues that tradition with a series of commissions that allow for meaningful and expansive conversations between artists and the public. 2025 will see a large-scale collaborative artwork by Ahmet Öğüt at Stratford station in collaboration with New Contemporaries, a new audio commission by Rory Pilgrim for millions of commuters at Waterloo station, and a new painting by Rudy Loewe at Brixton Underground station, continuing its series of commissions that respond to the rich history of murals in the area from the 1980s, and the wider social and political history of mural making.

In its breadth and presence across London, the 2025 programme reflects on the history and movement of the city today.

Art on the Underground’s 2025 programme features major commissions situated across London including:

a large scale artwork by Ahmet Öğüt at Stratford Underground Station in March 2025 in collaboration with New Contemporaries
a new artwork by Agnes Denes for the Spring 2025 Pocket Tube Map
a new audio work by Rory Pilgrim for Waterloo Station in June 2025
and a work by Rudy Loewe for the ninth Brixton Mural Programme in November 2025

Art on the Underground Staff Writer in Residence 2024

The Shark is the first release from the 2024 Art on the Underground Writer in Residence, Kristel Tracey. The work is a reflection and response to A Taste of Home, an artwork by artist Joy Gregory, which is currently on display at Heathrow Terminal 4 Underground station. Like Joy’s artwork, Kristel’s short story is inspired by the stories of the refugee and asylum-seeking communities living in temporary accommodation near the airport and the poems ‘Home’ and ‘Seeds in Flight’ by Warsan Shire and Khaled Abdallah respectively.

Kristel is TfL’s Head of Advocacy and Engagement and has worked for the organisation for just over three years. Previously an avid writer with work published in both print and digital, she is now reexploring her passion for creative writing alongside her career and parenting her 5-year-old daughter.

Kristel said: The stories of the refugee and asylum seeker community Joy spoke to while exceptional and not universal, speak to the deeper feelings of belonging, loss, upheaval, loneliness, anxiety and the desire for home that are universal. We all want to be able to decide for ourselves where home is. It implores the reader to home in on their humanity, rather than headlines that narrow human stories down to dehumanised statistics.

The Art on the Underground Writer in Residence is annual creative opportunity for a TfL staff member to develop their writing by working with TfL’s contemporary art programme Art on the Underground over a period of six months.

The Writer in Residence programme aims to highlight and amplify the creative voices within TfL, creating engaging responses to Art on the Underground’s ongoing programme.

Read the full story below.

The Fabric of Time

Art on the Underground presents a new artwork for the 40^th pocket Tube map cover by leading British artist Rita Keegan.

Titled ‘The Fabric of Time, the work is inspired by inspired by the fabrics of the seats on the London Underground and draws on Keegan’s photographs of London from the 1980s.

This new work follows Keegan’s previous works exploring memory, history, dress and adornment, often through her extensive family archive, a photographic record of a black middle class Canadian family dating from the 1890s. Keegan’s work crosses and often combines mediums – textiles, painting, copy art and media experimentation. Combining copy art, hand cut and digital collage, ‘The Fabric of Time’ layers 10 seat designs with a photo of the artist in her 30s at Brixton station where Keegan first lived when she moved to London, with a recently captured selfie in her hand.

The work holds multiple moments and histories in one image, bringing a personal record into public view and the significance of place and history. The work focuses on the fabric people sit on daily, an acknowledgement of time spent in transit and the things people may miss experiencing as they go about their habitual encounters. The work also celebrates the numerous moquette designers, many of them women who were not all credited in archives at the time.

Collectivity has always been present in how Keegan approaches her life and work; a practice aware of its place within a broader history and context and that celebrates the power of community. The Fabric of Time continues Keegan’s commitment to holding creative space with others, acknowledging people’s journeys and interdependencies.

Over the last year Keegan has researched London Underground’s archive of moquette fabrics to find a design rumoured to be by the late Althea McNish, one of the most important names in British textile design history, and whose designs included public art commissions and murals. This research is the foundation of Keegan’s commission and talks to the connections and relationships of an artist working in a wider London-based artistic community. The pocket Tube Map also coincides with the centenary of McNish’s birth in 2024. The featured moquette samples Keegan selected were also inspired by the history of design on the Tube and the direction of influential former London Transport chief executive Frank Pick.

Textile designers such as Enid Marx, Marion Dorn and Paul Nash Wallace Sewell and Marianne Straub were commissioned by London Transport. Featured in the artwork are designs by Wallace Sewell, Marianne Straub Jonathan Sothcott, Joy Jarvis, Jacqueline Groag and several that remain unattributed in the archives.

Angels of History

Angels of History is a new permanent artwork by Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings at St James’s Park station, the only Grade I listed station on the Tube network. The artwork is the first mosaic created by the artist duo, and is composed of six panels, each measuring 1.5 x 1 metres, prominently installed in the station’s atrium.

Quinlan and Hastings’s collaborative practice is an exploration of the relationship between public space, architecture, state infrastructure, gender, and sexual identity. Their recent output has focused on fresco painting, a medium traditionally associated with historic, religious artworks. Quinlan and Hastings’ paintings depict various power dynamics, class and social relations, and positions of authority playing out in public space, raising the question: who does the street belong to?

Quinlan and Hastings’s Art on the Underground commission draws from the rich history of the building in which it will be installed: 55 Broadway, London Underground’s iconic Headquarters for over 80 years, located directly above St James’s Park station. It was the tallest building in London on its completion in 1929, and was immediately considered radical, in part thanks to the sculptures carved into its stone façade by artists including Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore. The choice to realise their new work in mosaic – a material frequently employed in post-war civic spaces – marks a new departure for the artists, who have drawn inspiration directly from the Roman mosaic tradition.

Whilst making Angels of History the pair became interested in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, an unfinished collection of writings on urban life in Paris during the 19th century, where he argues that the most perilous moments of crisis aren’t when everything portends to change, but rather when ‘the status quo threatens to be preserved.’ Exterior and interior architecture plays an important role in Hastings & Quinlan’s practice, as a force that shapes people’s behaviour and desires; and the work depicts a handful of isolated buildings: a row of post-war terraced houses, three Art Deco skyscrapers, and 55 Broadway. Post-war housing, which frequently appears in Hastings & Quinlan’s work, is particularly relevant for the pair in relation to Benjamin’s perspective of what emerges from the rubble of history.

While a utopian ideal underlined the post-war social housing movement, suburban architecture of this period helped to constrain sex and gender into its purely reproductive form both biologically and economically. Art Deco was an architectural style representing luxury, glamour, exuberance and faith in technological progress.

Angels of History is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), wherein Benjamin describes the painting Angelus Novus by Paul Klee as an image of the ‘angel of history.’ Quinlan and Hastings’ work centres on two triptychs featuring androgynous, angelic figures, whose ambivalent gazes are turned towards one another and fall over the commuters passing beneath them. During the creation of the work the pair reflected on the angels of the Old Testament, who were at once sublime and terrible to behold.

The figures are set against an uncanny landscape of rolling hillsides. Full-scale frescoes were painted by the pair as a template for the final mosaic work; these were conceived while the artists were in residency in St Ives, Cornwall. The wild and ancient landscape of Cornwall, particularly Zennor’s megalithic pagan monuments, were a significant influence on the barren and sparsely populated landscape found in the artwork, which speaks to an ecology in crisis; an image of the future in which few relics of humanity persist.

Situated between Westminster – where the future is debated – and the Royal Palaces – where the past is preserved – Quinlan and Hastings’s work reflects on a period of reactionary political nostalgia embodied by the UK leaving the European Union.

Against a backdrop of global conflict and political upheaval, Angels of History occupies a curious space between past, present and future, the divine angelic figures embodying these multiple perspectives and temporalities, to watch over London in perpetuity.

Three Women

Three Women is a new artwork for Brixton Underground station by renowned British artist and Turner Prize 2024 nominee, Claudette Johnson.

Johnson works primarily in large-scale drawings, using a range of media, from gouache and watercolour to oil pastel and pencil. Addressing the personal as political and challenging harmful stereotypes of representation through figuration and gesture, Johnson’s work gives space and power to the presence of Black women and men and offers a mediation on shared humanity.

Johnson’s first public artwork, Three Women, is a new triptych of Black female figures. The work references Trilogy, a three-part work Johnson made in the 1980s of three standing female figures. In Three Women, the sitters’ positions share a resonance with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). This painting has been a critical point of return for Johnson, both for its formal accomplishments and its problematic and fractured engagement with African art and the female form. Encountering the work for the first time as a student was formative for Johnson, evoking questions about how she might locate herself in her work, and as a Black woman confronting the denials and distortions of Western art history.

With Three Women, Johnson returns to these questions. Depicted in monumental form for Brixton Underground station, the three figures reach beyond the edges of the composition, interrupting homogenised understandings of art and claiming space and power for Black women in the public realm.

A Taste of Home

A Taste of Home is a new artwork by leading artist and photographer Joy Gregory for Heathrow Terminal 4 Underground station.

Renowned for her influence on British feminist photography and social justice movements since the 1980s, Joy Gregory uses photographic media to re-illuminate overlooked narratives around identity, race, gender and social history which underscore contemporary society.

A Taste of Home expands on Gregory’s interest in themes of migration, memory and plant knowledge. Recognising Heathrow as a gateway to London, a portal of entry and exit as people pass in and out of the city, Gregory has rooted this commission in dialogue with the community of refugees and asylum seekers currently living in temporary accommodation near the airport, many of whom are supported by the Hillingdon-based charity, Refugees in Effective and Active Partnership (REAP).

The artwork offers a space for the stories of newly arrived Londoners, displaced people whose realities are increasingly maligned and misrepresented, and explores how we carry a sense of home with us in the plants and food we cook, share and remember.

The artwork is installed on a series of twenty-four billboards in the Piccadilly line ticket hall rotunda of Heathrow Terminal 4 station and brings together excerpts of a poem from the Poetry Translation Centre by Khaled Abdallah, ‘Seeds in Flight’, and Warsan Shire’s poem ‘Home’. These poetic fragments sit alongside ingredients which were discussed as ‘tastes of home’ during a series of photographic workshops Gregory facilitated in the temporary accommodation, collaged over botanical artworks Gregory created using techniques such as cyanotype and monotype printing.

The twenty-four artworks expand on the photographic collage technique used for Gregory’s 2023 pocket Tube map artwork A Little Slice of Paradise, which was inspired by TfL’s history of staff cultivated station gardens. Rooted in solidarity, A Taste of Home mediates on the ways that compassion and food connects us, across oceans and beyond borders, and celebrates the cultures, languages and hopes which coalesce in London.

Joy Gregory, artist, said: “I have long been fascinated by the journeys of food and plants, how they traverse continents and cultures, weaving stories of migration and resilience. Plants are central to our being, they sustain our bodies, heart, and soul. They embody the essence of human migration, reflecting our innate desire for new beginnings—sometimes chosen, but all too often, imposed by circumstances beyond our control. In the words of the poet, Warsan Shire, ‘No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark’. This poignant line encapsulates the harsh realities faced by those forced to flee their homes in search of safety and refuge. A Taste of Home is a project that honours the richness of diverse cultures and the shared humanity that binds us all.”

A Taste of Home includes excerpts from two poems:

‘Home’ by Warsan Shire, from the collection ‘Bless The Daughter Raised By A Voice In Her Head’

‘Seeds in Flight’ by Khaled Abdallah, translated from Arabic by Sara Vaghefian with participants at a Poetry Translation Centre translation workshop.

The Poetry Translation Centre, founded by the poet Sarah Maguire in 2004, champions poetry from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America in English translation, working with diaspora communities for whom poetry is of great importance.

Thanks to Reed, the family-run recruitment and business services company and current annual sponsor for the Art on the Underground programme.

Radio Underground

‘Radio Underground’ was a new sound work by London-based artist Joe Namy – developed over a period of collaboration with three organisations supported by the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme.

Joe Namy works in sound, performance, radio and video – this new project continues Namy’s interest in the politics of listening, music and translation by inviting creatives connected to different cultural and community spaces in London to contribute to a new 10-minute sound work.

‘Radio Underground’ was developed through dialogue and co-creation with Sister Midnight, a cooperative community radio station in south London; Colour Factory, a live music venue and nightclub in Hackney; and PalMusic UK, a music education charity supporting young Palestinian Musicians and celebrating Palestinian music.

Spoken word and segments of speech from each organisation are layered with original music from flautist Wissam Boustany (PalMusic), oud player Saied Silbak (PalMusic), flautist Ruth Montgomery (Audiovisability), and theremin by Lenny Watson (Sister Midnight).

The work could be heard at Waterloo Underground station from 15-28 July 2024, Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, through the station speakers along the moving walkway connecting the Northern and Jubilee lines. Echoing the style of a radio broadcast, ‘Radio Underground’ brought a new sonic experience to the station, a public broadcast that called on people to listen to each other in new ways, to new rhythms and to shared interconnections.

The work created a space to find solidarity, and for culture and community to express resilience and an understanding of the socio-political power music holds. Radio Underground could also be accessed through a QR code on a poster campaign across the London Underground, with a link to imagery that gave visual rhythm to the sound and constellation of the many parts, people, places and histories that made up the work.

Credits

Voices:
Ekow Oliver, presenter
Val Woods, relax
Isabella Cobb, weather presenter
Nai Barghouti, siren
Nathanael Williams, Colour Factory
Miss Alexis Bailey, style presenter & songstress
Wissam Boustany, PalMusic UK
Saied Silbek, PalMusic UK
George Mills, keffiyeh child
Clara Buffong, presenter
Lenny Watson, Sister Midnight
Sophie Farrel, Sister Midnight

Music:
Lenny Watson, theramin
Ruth Montgomery, flute
Wissam Boustany, flute
Saied Silbek. oud
Joe Namy, drums
Star Power Drummer, drums

with excerpts from:
Nai Barghouti, Granada Calling (accapella)
Cécile B Evans and Joe Namy – Prelude and Fugue 100 (for Wendy) (REMIX)

Recorded and mixed at Somerset House Studios, Studio 53, Wysing Arts Centre, and BBS Community Radio. Additional recordings by Other Cinemas. Special thanks to Audiovisability for accessibility consultation and thanks to Suhel Nafar and Amal Khalaf.
Design by Hato

Art on the Underground Staff Writer in Residence 2024 at St James's Park

The Angel of History Speaks is the second work from Art on the Underground’s 2024/2025 Writer in Residence Kristel Tracey. Inspired by the ‘Angels of History’, a permanent work by Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan, above the stairs to and from the platforms at the Broadway entrance of St James’s Park station.

The Angel of History Speaks will be installed on the platform of St James’s Park Underground station as an artwork poster, launching April 22nd 2025 and on view for one year.

Kristel Tracey responds to Hastings and Quinlan’s work, drawing a line between the permanent artwork, Paul Klee’s painting ‘Angelus Novus’ from just over a century before and Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of that work, where he described the painting as an image of the ‘angel of history’. In this offering, Kristel imagines the voice of Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’ speaking to us, the audience.

Kristel is a London based writer, mother and TfL’s Head of Stakeholder Advocacy and Engagement. Published in both print and digital formats over the years, Kristel’s writing style ranges from short stories, to think pieces and poetry. She is often inspired to write about the world around her, thinking about how to make the reader reflect on how to enjoy the beauty of it and make it better for everyone.

The Art on the Underground Writer in Residence is a creative opportunity for a TfL staff member to develop their writing by working with TfL’s contemporary art programme Art on the Underground over a period of six months.

The Writer in Residence programme aims to highlight and amplify the creative voices within TfL, creating engaging responses to Art on the Underground’s ongoing programme.

The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

– Walter Benjamin on the ‘Angel of History’

ANGEL OF HISTORY

We have grown weary of the ruin, tired of this infinite loop; we are propelled forward by the winds of your progress, yet we watch the same mistakes repeated.

Can we stop for a moment to rest our wings? May we take some time to tend to our hearts which have grown cynical, yet still yearn to be heard?

Stay with us for a moment, we do not have long. We have learnt the hard way that time waits for no one.

Our ears echo with the cries of the unheard, on whom this ‘progress’ is built. Will you slow down enough to hear them too? Your monuments and history books won’t remember them, but we bear witness. We try to collect fragments from the ashes, ancient knowledge of the unheard left scattered; fragments which you could use to cultivate something else.

What would a future look like that treated all living things as sacred? Our grief does not differentiate or care for your hierarchies. What if all life was seen as worthy of protection for its connection to other living things on this beautiful, broken planet?

One life does not destroy another without disfiguring itself.

Halls and walls of power may fall. What of the power that is contained within your own flesh and bones? What wonders humans have created in the name of love! What if you planted seeds of creation on the ruins of false idols, that need not be watered by the spilling of blood?

We cannot hold off the winds any longer, and you must be on your way. We leave you with this:

The future is yet to be written – if you were holding the pen, what would it be?

– Art on the Underground 2025 Staff Writer in Residence Kristel Tracey

Art on the Underground · Angel of History by Kristel Tracey, Art on the Underground 2024/25 Writer in Residence

A Little Slice of Paradise

In 2023, Art on the Underground presented a new artwork for the 39^th pocket Tube map cover by leading British artist Joy Gregory.

Titled A Little Slice of Paradise and inspired by Transport for London’s 100-year history of staff cultivated station gardens, Joy Gregory created a rich photographic collage for the cover of the December 2023 pocket Tube map.

Renowned for her influence on British feminist photography and social justice movements, Gregory uses photographic media to re-illuminate forgotten cultural, historical and political narratives. As a British artist of Jamaican heritage Gregory’s practice often explores on the relationship between colonialism and identity and plant knowledge.

Since 1910, Transport for London has run an annual competition called ‘In Bloom’, which recognises staff for their efforts cultivating gardens in unlikely station environments.

Inspired by TfL’s gardens, Gregory wanted to create a Tube map cover for the people who will experience the artwork most frequently – station staff. A Little Slice of Paradise pays tribute to staff and their gardens.

The title was inspired by a conversation Gregory had with gardener and Customer Service Manager, Tony Samuel, who described the garden he and his colleagues had created at Morden station as ‘a little slice of paradise’.

The artwork features a cyanotype imprint of chickweed grown in station gardens digitally collaged with photographs of flowers including camellias, dahlias, daisies, and nastursiums in station gardens. Gregory often uses camera-less photographic techniques such as cyanotypes, which captures the imprint of an object laid on top of light sensitive photographic paper in blue hues. The cyanotype was notably used by some of the earliest known women photographers to document botanical objects at a time when women were discouraged from engaging with the sciences. In her practice, Gregory draws on this feminist history using the cyanotype to re-illuminate and reframe overlooked narratives about identity, race, gender and social history which underscore contemporary society.

Evocative of the rich palette of Dutch Old Master flower paintings and the histories of photography, Gregory’s artwork offered customers a reminder of the station gardens to carry with them as they travel through the city.

Joy Gregory, Artist said: “The most beautiful and rewarding part of working on this commission was seeing the positive impact these gardens had on the lives of people using the transportation system, as well as the pleasure it conveyed to the creators of these enchanting spaces and their colleagues.”

Justine Simons OBE, Deputy Mayor for Culture and Creative Industries, said: “Our Tube stations are not just transport hubs, they are icons of design and each one has something that makes it special. Cultivated gardens on London’s transport network are part of that rich tapestry and I want to thank artist Joy Gregory for merging past and present floral designs in the new pocket Tube map cover.

“It is a wonderful daily reminder for all of us who travel on the Tube network of the effort and dedication TfL staff have put into maintaining these magnificent gardens. Thank you for making our commute more enjoyable, helping us build a greener and better London for all.”

Eleanor Pinfield, TfL’s Head of Art on the Underground, said: “Gregory has turned a spotlight on a fascinating part of TfL’s history and a vibrant part of its contemporary life. Bringing the botanical to the front of the pocket Tube map is a fitting tribute to TfL staff who nurture plants year-round. This new artwork is a poignant reminder of the care that staff bring to the spaces we use every day as we travel.”