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.

Joe Namy: 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 at St James's Park

‘Ode to the Mother’ is the second release from the Art on the Underground Writer in Residence Anthony Okolie. Inspired by ‘Rebirth of a Nation’ an artwork currently on display at Brixton Underground station until winter 2024 by artist Jem Perucchini.

‘Ode to the Mother’ will be installed on the platform of St James’s Park Underground Station as an artwork poster, launching February 22nd 2024 and on view for one year.

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.

ODE TO THE MOTHER

Saviour Her Equality/Her Equality Ruler,

All hail the almighty creator,

The homemaker,

Hence why, ‘Mother Nature’,

The law of attraction creates infinite life,

Divine feminine, named as the wife,

Unlimited wisdom as a matter of fact,

She can stroke my ego all the way back,

Her sweet voice sings away the blues,

Size 5 but that isn’t why you couldn’t walk in her shoes,

On long wintry mornings, her will never fails,

Through the darkest summers, she somehow prevails,

The cool breeze tempts the leaves,

Tall black trees, rooted in glory,

Bloody cycles of pain she endures to alibi his story,

A happy bereavement deep within.

She raises men,

Soft and cuddly, foremost point of reference,

Incomparable, she can’t be venerated by a single sentence,

Not to mention, walking in the snow,

Looking at the stars to know, we’re connected via soul,

For unforgettable memories, I’m Nat King Cole,

You give me the sense to have it all.

Anthony Okolie – Art on the Underground Staff 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.”

2024 Programme Announcement

Art on the Underground’s programme for 2024 comprises major new works from six contemporary artists. Since the early Twentieth century, artists, designers and architects have been at the forefront of London Underground’s presence in the city. Working with six contemporary artists across the year, Art on the Underground’s commissions consider this history and the collective experience of travel: through the stations themselves and the communities around them. The 2024 programme continues Art on the Underground’s commitment to creating critical frameworks for meaningful and expansive conversations and outcomes with artists, publics and public space.

The 2024 programme features new commissions and collaborative audio works that intervene at St James’s Park at 55 Broadway, London Underground’s historic headquarters, interrogate the organisation’s history of moquette fabric design, as well as new commissions at Brixton and at Heathrow. In its breadth and presence across London, the 2024 programme reflects on the history of London Underground whilst giving voice to the pluralism and movement of the city today.

Art on the Underground’s 2024 programme features major commissions situated across London including:

• British artist Joy Gregory will expand on her photographic artwork for the 39th pocket Tube map cover with a series of artworks created in dialogue with the local community for Heathrow Terminal 4 station in July.
• London and Beirut-based artist Joe Namy will produce a new sound work with the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme, bringing a new audio work to the London Underground network in July.
• British artist Rita Keegan will develop a new commission exploring the history of moquette design for the pocket Tube map in August.
• British artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings will create a major permanent mosaic work at historic St James’s Park station in October.
• Leading British artist Claudette Johnson will create a new mural artwork at Brixton station in November.

Art on the Underground Staff Writer in Residence 2023

Art on the Underground Staff Writer in Residence 2023.

‘DESCEND and DISSENT’ is the first release from the Art on the Underground Writer in Residence Anthony Okolie. Inspired by Declaration of Independence by Barby Asante which launched in September 2023 with a performance at Stratford station.

The Art on the Underground Writer in Residence is a programme for a TfL staff member to develop their writing by working with Art on the Underground.

The Writer in Residence programme will highlight and amplify the creative voices within TfL, creating engaging responses to Art on the Underground artists and artworks throughout 2023.

Anthony said: As a captivated spectator of Barby Asante’s Declaration of Independence performance, I was quite simply overwhelmed with inspiration.

The strong message invoked a powerful image of my ascendants sharing their collective anguish on the streets I proudly call home.

The words and atmosphere conjured by the performance resonated with me, and I also detected a distinct tone of triumph that stirred my creativity. 

As times have changed, the voices of the oppressed has grown louder. Wisdom and understanding have broken down some of the social barriers that stand between equality and diversity.

My poem is a reflection and representation of the hope for a better world that never died.

DESCEND and DISSENT

Sitting under the sun’s ray, a hopeful day,

While softly, my doubts are cast away;

One-by-one they fall, surely but slow,

Tears don’t flow like a weeping willow;

Who will take heed of my silent cry?

Who else if not me, myself or I?

Before it was written it was perceived as a vision,

An elaborate concept of unified division,

They don’t want to listen so they can never see,

Live in a prison or choose to be free,

We spend our lives blind to inevitability,

Accepting inequalities when they say it’s a democracy,

They bar the horizon they can approach at a meander;

Despite what you read, it’s all propaganda,

When will you breathe? Just seek to find the answer,

The phoenix can rise without a pyromancer,

Oh, my faith can still transcend,

And so, I cannot lose before I ascend,

The time is still now, where brave souls make amends,

Collectively bargained between enemies and friends.

Rebirth of a Nation

Art on the Underground is pleased to present a new artwork by Jem Perucchini at Brixton Underground station from November 2023, marking the Italian artist’s first major commission.

Titled Rebirth of a Nation, the large-scale public artwork will be on view for a year and is the latest in a series of commissions for the station, following on from the work of artists including Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Joy Labinjo. Initiated in 2018, the programme invites artists to respond to the diverse narratives of the area, in recognition of the local murals painted in Brixton in the 1980s.

Born in Ethiopia but based in Italy since childhood, Perucchini is powerfully influenced by Italian art history. Conjuring the Early Renaissance with his distinctive, richly detailed painting style, his new work for Brixton station captures ethereal figures with luminous light. The composition is an allegorical vision in which the past, embodied by a female figure, and the future, her mirror image, meet. Flanked by two men holding spears, the women are distinguished by their sumptuously decorated clothes. One clasps a purple orb; historically a symbol of sovereign power in painting iconography. The elaborately detailed fabrics are evocative of African wax cloth, a material interwoven with the skill, artistry and identities of the diverse African diaspora. Bathed in the rays of a rising orange sun, the four figures inhabit an otherworldly environment of irregular compositional perspective, imbued with warm hues and a meditational quality that is evocative of a Renaissance altarpiece.

For this new work Perucchini maintains a strong connection to his practice, focussing on the active role of Western art history in the construction of archetypes. Certain representative figures dominate the art historical canon, and traditionally hold distinct positions in the social and symbolic hierarchy. Mining for overlooked narratives, Perucchini’s compositions are both familiar and enigmatic, and reimagine how the fantasies of the past can impact on the realities of the present.

This work’s inspiration is drawn from the Ivory Bangle Lady, the name given to the occupant of an ancient grave dated to around the 4th century. The Ivory Bangle Lady was of North African origin; her grave was found in York. The stone grave contained rare, imported objects and valuable jewellery, one of which was an elephant ivory bangle. These objects indicate that she was amongst the richest inhabitants of the region and enjoyed a high social status. Other archaeological finds also support the theory that African people had a place in the upper echelons of Roman society, suggesting that early Britain may have been more ethnically diverse than mainstream history suggests. Perucchini’s reference to this rich cultural past underscores how history can be seen and interpreted from multiple viewpoints and charges the work with questions about the hierarchy of narratives, the construction of national identity and how some histories are privileged, whilst others are erased.

Drawing from Brixton, one of London’s most distinctive areas, Perucchini’s work responds to an environment shaped by its diverse residents and their histories. As a nucleus for Black British history, the area has been shaped by recent social and political movements. In post-war London many West Indian immigrants settled in Brixton – almost a third who travelled on the Empire Windrush made it their home – and it quickly became a centre for the Black community. Perucchini’s work challenges the notion that Black British history stretches no further back than the 20th Century, celebrating the long lineage of Black Britons who came before and pointing towards an equally glorious future, set within a divine and timeless world.