
Go Find Miracles
Go Find Miracles is a new sound artwork by 2023 Turner Prize-nominated artist Rory Pilgrim for Waterloo station commissioned by Art on the Underground.
This new work emerges from Pilgrim’s long-term work with those affected by the criminal justice system. Recorded in two underground locations, with Go Find Miracles, Pilgrim asks how we go beneath the surface to imagine new structures of repair and possibility.
The work has been developed in collaboration with HMP/YOI Portland and the Prison Choir Project, as well as the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme (CCSaR) and the Feminist Library in Peckham. Go Find Miracles can be heard at Waterloo Underground station along the travelator connecting the Northern and Jubilee lines, between 14-25 July 2025.
Rory Pilgrim works collaboratively and in dialogue with others, across music composition, performance, film, drawing and text, reflecting and redefining how we come together to shape social change.
Go Find Miracles focuses on the role that the Isle of Portland, a small island in the English Channel, has played in shaping London through its quarries. Portland stone has been used to build many of London’s most iconic buildings, including the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral, TfL’s historic headquarters – 55 Broadway, and Waterloo station itself. Trains to and from Portland’s closest station, Weymouth, arrive and depart from Waterloo – which acts as a gateway to the island, whose resources have built so much of the capital.
The Isle of Portland is also the site of two prisons, including HMP/YOI Portland, and the former site of prison barge HMP Weare and the Bibby Stockholm which temporarily housed asylum seekers. The labour of the people imprisoned on the island has historically shaped its landscape, with the many stone quarries originally being worked by imprisoned people who were initially brought to Portland in 1848 to construct the 2.84-mile-long harbour breakwater.
Expanding from Pilgrim’s long-term collaboration with communities on Portland and developed following a workshop at The Feminist Library in London, which used collections of intersectional feminist literature from the 1970s until the present day, Go Find Miracles explores the ways that the law impacts our lives and our environment. Reflecting on the idea of a miracle as an opening for change and a prayer as a sequence of connection through the words we share with each other, the artwork is structured around a call and response prayer.
Go Find Miracles was recorded underground in a Portland stone quarry, amongst the layers in which deep time connects us with our modern world, and on the disused Jubilee line platform at Charing Cross London Underground station: bringing voices from Portland and London together.
The sound work takes the form of a conversation, spoken reflections and poetry by Carina Murray and Holly Upton are accompanied by music composed by Pilgrim and sung by soloist Robyn Haddon, alumni of the Prison Choir Project, and a further choir of singers with whom Pilgrim has previously collaborated for projects including pink & green, 2024 and RAFTS, 2022. The lyrics and melodies of the work have partly been written together with men from HMP/YOI Portland.
Constituting a prayer of call and response that ultimately traces a 10-minute loop without end, Go Find Miracles asks, if we break the loop, is it here we find space for miracles?
Go Find Miracles can be heard alongside visual artworks by Pilgrim depicting songbirds carrying messages between London and Portland. These drawings are installed throughout Waterloo Underground station making visible the listening experience and the ripple of connection between the two places explored in the work.
An expanded leaflet documenting the development of Go Find Miracles is available to collect from the station. A short film by 2025 Jarman award nominees, Other Cinemas, about the making of Go Find Miracles, will be available to view on art.tfl.gov.uk from 21 July 2025.
Go Find Miracles is the third audio commission developed in collaboration with The Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Space’s at Risk programme (CCSaR) to spotlight and amplify grassroots organisations they have supported, and produce audio installations that can be heard across London Underground stations.
Credits
Collaborators: The Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk team, The Feminist Library, HMP/YOI Portland, Learners from HMP/YOI Portland & The Prison Choir Project
Design: Wolfe Hall
Production & facilitation: Elizabeth Graham & Rory Pilgrim
Composition: Rory Pilgrim
Speakers: Carina Murray & Holly Upton
Sound recording & mixing: Lucas August
Sound editing: Nada Smiljanic
Singers: Adam Green, Darren, George, Marcello, Robyn Haddon, Todd Harris, Seraphina D’Arby and Marged Siôn
TfL Colleagues: Fernando Soler & Lota Anyakora
Recorded in an Albion Stone Ltd Portland stone mine on the Isle of Dorset, The Crypt Studio and on the disused Jubilee line platform at Charing Cross Underground station.