Art on the Underground presents a new artwork for the 40th 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.
Artist, Rita Keegan, said: “Being invited to do a piece for Art on the Underground was a great privilege. It has a long tradition and having been a person that has ridden the Underground most of their life seeing art in stations was always the most exciting thing, coming to Britain and finding just the nature of the Tube map is gorgeous. So yes, this has been a great experience.”
