The Night Tube map cover series, first launched in 2016, works with early career artists, and coincides with Art on the Underground’s long standing series of Pocket Tube map covers, established in 2004.
You in my bedroom presents a portrait in which Marie Jacotey turns the male gaze on its head, staging a voyeuristic image of a young man looking through his bedroom window at night. In the positioning of the subject with his back to the viewer, the portrait aims to evoke questions about the scene the observer is presented with. When making the work, Jacotey used her own experience of quiet, late night journeys by train and how these travels give space to ruminate and reflect. There is often a juxtaposition between loud, crowded groups heading towards or returning from late night social gatherings and tired, solitary travellers. For the cover of the map, Jacotey drew on this solitude using coloured pastel to create an intimate portrait of the night.
Jacotey’s work is a snapshot of contemporary relationships and social interactions in comic-strip form. Illustrated and interspersed with text, they are deeply material against the backdrop of our screen-based age. Collated from overheard conversations and images from social media, they are painful, tender, dark and comic ruminations on human encounters.
Marie Jacotey said: “With this image, I wished to convey a night-time feeling of intimacy and silence as well as evoke the floating mystery sometimes surrounding those dark hours. More broadly, I was also thinking of the night travellers who’ve either just left or are just about to get back home, to this state of very private quietness”.
A limited edition artwork to accompany the Night Tube Map is available to buy.
Art on the Underground commissioned a programme of exclusively of women artists in 2018, to mark the 100 year anniversary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act which gave some women the vote.
