This exhibition of artworks at Newbury Park Underground station marks the first in a new series of curatorial collaborations between Art on the Underground and TfL station colleagues. The programme is a way to collectively generate new artwork displays in stations and install artwork produced by members of London Underground’s Operational team.
‘Newbury Park: A Space Less Ordinary’ is a series of photographs by Robert Bassett that manipulate scenes of the iconic London Underground, specifically at Newbury Park Underground station – the trains, the station architecture, and the neighbouring bus station.
The artworks presented here playfully turn architecture into spaceship forms and distort familiar station spaces with shadows and colour filters to create speculative new future worlds and scenes – an experimental filter and understanding on the ordinary.
This new series of artwork exhibits is a way to generate new perspectives into everyday public space through artworks created by those working in stations daily, stimulating creativity and creating new collaborations and affinities with people and places.
Robert Bassett is an artist and musician who has worked at TfL for 25 years. Currently working as a Customer Station Supervisor at Newbury Park these photographs reimagine the station through a highly saturated and often futuristic-like lens. The everyday workplace becomes transformed through abstraction. By maximising colour and repeating and distorting form and shape, these images explore a new sense of place from the perspective of operational work at the station. The process of producing these images takes place at all hours and encompasses the changes to perspective that shift work can bring.
About his work, Robert said: “I’m excited to see them on display and interested in hearing what people will make of them. I hope it will help to brighten customers’ day a little and get them thinking about something different on their journey.”
