Art on the Underground - artist Dryden Goodwin brings talking heads to the Jubilee line
Date uploaded: February 8, 2010
Getting Paul McCartney through the ticket barrier, the Tube driver who looks like Boudicca reminiscing about driving the old 1930s stock trains and the baby nicknamed ‘Jubilee’ by staff who were present at its unexpected birth at Kingsbury station; these are just some of the true-life stories told by sixty London Underground staff in Linear, artist Dryden Goodwin’s project for the Jubilee Line.
Goodwin’s work was created as part of a series of new contemporary art commissions by Art on the Underground for the Jubilee line. The result is a fascinating multimedia project of drawings and short films which can be viewed online at www.tfl.gov.uk/art from the start of February 2010. A collection of pocket size, highly detailed pencil portraits of station and train staff will be displayed as posters at stations across the Tube network. All sixty portraits will be exhibited together on a billboard outside Southwark station. Artwork from this project will also be on show at London Bridge and Stanmore stations from February.
For the short films, Goodwin attached an HD camera to his drawing board. The viewer hears the conversation between sitter and artist and watches the face take shape under the pencil on screen, the film speed accelerated so that each portrait is completed within two minutes. The investment of time becomes an underlying theme of the work, manifest in a series of captions accompanying the drawings whereby the time taken to make each portrait is juxtaposed with the number of years each member of staff has worked on the Jubilee line.
Goodwin’s portraits only show the faces, not the uniforms of the staff, giving them all equal status as well as humanising the people who are sometimes ignored in the commuter rush.
Artist Dryden Goodwin said: “Travelling on the Underground we’re usually in a hurry – rushing down escalators, waiting on a station platform, focused on getting somewhere else. I wanted to create an archive of portraits that reveals some of the personalities behind the multitude of people who work on the Tube, people who are rarely acknowledged as individuals by members of the public.”
Art on the Underground’s Community Projects Curator Louise Coysh said: “Dryden has created an intriguing new work that unlocks the intimate stories from the people who work on the Jubilee line. He has not only helped give us an insight into the lives of the incredible Underground team, but has also created more opportunities for staff to connect with each other.”
View the drawings and film online
Download the full press release(538 KB)
