Monday 17th January 2005
Metro (page 38)
It’s that time of year when Londoners with January blues while away their daily Tube commute by dreaming of sunnier climes. Now, a young multi-media artist has turned her own daydreams into a collection of international postcards set to bring some exotic inspiration to Piccadilly Circus Station as part of London Underground’s Platform for Art programme.
Running from today until March 21, the exhibition records the journey of Goldsmiths graduate, Ellie Harrison, who used her annual Gold Travelcard to travel between her home in Ealing and her campus at Goldsmiths College, New Cross, in 2002. She recorded each journey made over the year - calculating the cumulative distance and marking “stages” on her journeys as if they corresponded to the equivalent distance to destinations all over the world.
With a total of 350 hours’ travel and 1,495 journeys on almost every Tube line and many bus and train routes, the project soon developed into an imaginary challenge to visit as many “destinations” as possible. The final work, Gold Card Adventures, comprises a series of 18 mock postcards - from Moscow to Mexico - with a note of the distances reached en route.
Platform for Art curator Tamsin Dillon said “Gold Card Adventures raises questions around local and global travel in the 21st Century by considering the meaning of distance and the possibility of seeing the world without even leaving the city”. For the full exhibition go to www.ellieharrison.com/goldcard.
