Art on the Underground is pleased to present the 42nd pocket Tube map cover, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, by internationally renowned artist Ellen Gallagher.
Gallagher is known for creating multi-layered works that explore literature, mythology, racial identity, stereotypes and oceanic themes. For this new commission, she combines these interests with references to London’s maritime past and the hidden histories beneath the city.
Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish expands on Gallagher’s interest in colonial geographies and marine mythology. Inspired by Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick and drawing parallels with the whaling and triangular trades, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish references Melville’s story of Pip, a young Black cabin boy who falls overboard. Gallagher imagines the underwater world Pip experiences, the skeletal form of a whale lying on the seabed forms the central composition and brings together themes of marine life, transatlantic history and memory.
For her pocket Tube map cover, Gallagher also drew inspiration from London’s waterways, particularly the long-buried River Fleet and its many ancient wells. The names of wells such as Clerkenwell and Sadler’s Wells mark the Fleet’s hidden course through the city. In Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, Gallagher visualises the hidden layers beneath London and connects them with the experience of travelling underground.
Reflecting on the Tube map itself, Gallagher was also inspired by Harry Beck’s iconic 1933 design, which abstracts geography into a clear and navigable diagram. Gallagher’s artwork suggests that much like the map, travelling through the Underground involves moving through unseen and liminal spaces. For Gallagher, liminal spaces are vital for holding a generosity towards one another in public space.
Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish invites us to reflect on the ways we navigate both the physical and historical geographies of London as we move through the Underground.
This project has been supported by Art Fund.
About Ellen Gallagher
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Ellen Gallagher lives and works between Rotterdam, Netherlands and New York. Gallagher builds multi-layered paintings that pivot between the natural world, mythology and history. Her painting process involves undoing and reforming trains of thought often over long periods of time and across linked bodies of works. Over a highly multifaceted career, Gallagher’s work has been united by what she calls a ‘jitter,’ an intellectual approach in which aesthetic possibilities are shook loose from seismic cracks beneath the surface of cultural entities normally thought to be unshakable and impermeable. Encompassing painting, drawing, collage and celluloid-based projections that fuse technique and material into syncretic form, her arresting compositions are a process of recovery and reconstitution through the accumulation and erasure of media, which results in palimpsestic and topographic surfaces.
The subtle textures of her paintings bear witness to a singular process that is materially and conceptually intertwined. Gallagher creates a geographic timeline in which interlocking forms appear to mutate between figuration and abstraction, like agents in a musical composition coming together in an evolving continuum. Gallagher’s work is included in many major international museum collections including MoMA, New York; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; MCA Chicago; MOCA, Los Angeles; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Tate, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.
