This is an archived page from the Website Archive of British artist Ellie Harrison from Version 3.0 (active 2008 - 2015). New website: www.ellieharrison.com

last updated
15th July 2015

February 2005
AN Magazine (page 21)
By Stephen Palmer


The result of a year-long project by Ellie Harrison, “Gold Card Adventures” is presented until 21 March at Piccadilly Circus Underground station, London, courtesy of Platform for Art.

Purchasing a Gold Card year’s travel pass and using her daily commute between Ealing and New Cross as the basis, she recorded the journeys, calculated the cumulative distance and began marking the stages of the ongoing journey as if they were visits to target destinations around the world.

The project developed into an imaginary challenge to visit as many places as possible. Through Gold Card Adventures, the artist exoticises the usually mundane notion of commuting by likening banal journeys to voyages that are potentially far more exiting. In the process of making relatively dull trips around London, she created a work that addresses complex issues around travel and the expectation and perception of visits to worldwide destinations.

The resulting exhibition is a selection of twenty posters from a larger set that present mock postcards from the destinations, with a note of the distances involved. The full set - plus a log of every tube, train and bus journey, are published on www.ellieharrison.com/goldcard.

Describing her work as inspired by the “manipulation and representation of data collected from within my everyday routine”, the artist’s previous projects include Eat 22 - a year long documentation of everything she ate, presented as part of the Wellcome Trust’s “Treat Yourself” exhibition at London’s Science Museum in 2003, and Sneezes 2003 - a record of her 318 sneezes during that year, shown at the Wallner Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham.

Thanks to a-n “I’ve been a subscriber to a-n Magazine since I graduated”, says Ellie Harrison, “It has proved a fantastic resource and offered me so many of the great opportunities I’ve had over four years a practising artist”.