An artwork by London-based artist Rita Keegan inspired by the fabrics of the seats on the London Underground adorns the cover of the 40th pocket Tube map, which launches today (Tuesday 26 November) as part of Transport for London’s (TfL) Art on the Underground programme. The map will be the first to feature the new names and colours for each of the London Overground lines.
‘The Fabric of Time’ 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.
‘The Fabric of Time’ draws on Keegan’s photographs of London from the 1980s and the history of Tube seat fabrics. Combining copy art, hand cut and digital collage, the piece 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. Keegan’s design for the pocket Tube Map is the first to contain the new names and colours for the six London Overground lines – Liberty, Lioness, Mildmay, Suffragette, Weaver and Windrush – which will launch later this week in a historic change for London’s transport network. Like its predecessors, the map will also show all available toilets on the network.
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 and who were not all credited in archives at the time.
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. 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.
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.”
