Bringing Art to the Masses With Art on the Underground

Art on the Underground has unveiled its new commission by Heather Phillipson. Here, we take a closer look at one of London’s largest public art initiatives, which has displayed artworks throughout the underground network for over 15 years.

Next time you’re travelling through Gloucester Road station, be prepared to encounter a bizarre land of giant eggs and kitchen utensils, punctuated by computer game-esque videos. Pitched as the most ambitious project in Art on the Underground’s history, Heather Phillipson has transformed a disused platform with an immersive sculptural and video installation, my name is lettie eggsyrub (2018). “The title comes from the last line of a poem by British poet Tom Raworth. It’s got this real element of surprise and it’s absurd,” Phillipson explains. “I’m really interested in absurdity and how it might sit within the comic and the tragic.”

As the artist’s first public commission in the UK, Phillipson has taken full advantage of the expansive 80-metre platform to explore how we as humans interfere with egg production. “The egg is something that is this conflicted being,” Phillipson says. “It’s non-gendered, it hasn’t come into being, it’s this promise of something that is about to happen. Obviously the actual egg, the hen’s egg, is very much an object that is under constant threat.”

“It’s a complex work,” says Eleanor Pinfield, head of Art on the Underground. “It’s about the familiar and the unfamiliar and how we as a society sort of relentlessly follow these consumption patterns of eating and living and ignoring what is happening to the world around us.”

Phillipson, who will be taking on another public art commission in 2020 with the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, has transformed the platform with her absurd installation. “I was really keen that the work looked like it was part of the architecture, forced into it somehow,” she states. “I got caught up in the system of the underground, thinking about the subjectivity of bodies within the network. And I wanted the work to be a really huge proportion, so the role is reversed and as the human we are dwarfed by this other creature.”

Since 2000, Transport for London (TfL) has facilitated and funded Art on the Underground (formerly Platform for Art), which displays permanent and temporary artworks, installations and interventions within the fabric of the Tube network. From disused station platforms to ticket halls, a wealth of international artists have been invited to create works that enhance passengers’ daily commute and change how we experience the city.

“What we were particularly interested in responding to was reframing and bringing these female voices out,” Pinfield tells Culture Trip about the approach of working exclusively with female artists for the 2018 programme. “We know there is a disparity in the arts and certainly when you look at public art it’s almost always made by men. What I’m intrigued about it is what happens when you take this different lens.”

Even though Gloucester Road has been the longest-running location of the programme, Pinfield is keen to use new spaces throughout the network. The header wall as you enter Brixton station will become the site for a new curated series of works that engage in the area’s wider public context.

The Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby is the first artist to take on the new programme. Known for her work that explores cultural identity, Crosby will be looking closely at the local community. “We’re excited to see how she will respond. We’ve asked her to bounce off the Brixton murals and how they really capture collective memory,” says Pinfield.

The way in which the new commissions reflect an international perspective is very key to the success of Art on the Underground. Pinfield is mindful that around 40% of people living in London weren’t born in the UK, and therefore to represent the city you need diversity within the artists you work with. The 28th edition of the pocket map cover has been designed by Romanian nonagenarian artist Geta Brătescu. “Geta would be a difficult artist for us to work with on other types of projects, but with the pocket map it can be a really beautiful way of bringing art to millions of people,” explains Pinfield. The custom maps are so successful that when a new edition comes out, people email from all over the world asking to be sent one.

This article first appeared on Culture Trip.