Underground Movement
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”.
Further Reference
- Gold Card Adventures
- Gold Card Adventures exhibition website
- Art on the Underground website
- Eat 22 website
- Treat Yourself online exhibition
- Sneezes 2003
Other Press
- After the Data Confessional: Interview with Ellie Harrison
- Night at the Museum
- Interview: Ellie Harrison
- A Most Unusual Referendum Results Party
- Art Review: Counterpoint
- Getting Straight to the Point
- Confetti Cannon Primed to Explode, or Maybe Not
- Indyref Confetti Cannon to go on Display at Edinburgh Art Festival
- Counterpoint at Edinburgh Art Festival 2014
- Eat 22 (interview with Ellie Harrison)
- Power For The People! (by Ellie Harrison)
- Counter-Hegemonic Propaganda Machine (by Ellie Harrison)
- The Hunger Artists
- The Artists’ Bond
- Notes Towards Becoming a Good Citizen (interview with Ellie Harrison)
- She Shelves Sanctuary
- National Museum of Roller Derby (interview with Ellie Harrison)
- Early Warning Signs
- Artist Fund Thyself
- Ellie & Oliver Show
- Art for the Age of Information
- Workers Are Not Alone
- Market Forces
- DIY Lottery Art Funding
- Converse Emerging Artists Award: Ellie Harrison
- Fair Exchange
- Vault Art Glasgow
- A Good Climate for Business (by Ellie Harrison)
- Interview with Ellie Harrison
- A Brief History of Privatisation
- Art Monthly Profile
- Work-a-thon for the Self-Employed
- Trajectories (interview with Ellie Harrison)
- Furtherfield Radio
- Funding: One Alternative
- New Forms of Collectivity (by Ellie Harrison)
- The Finished Article
- Art Erupts Out of a Fine Mess
- Artists in a Bid for Success with Different Type of Draw
- Party Politics: Election Art
- Young Scottish Artists
- Budget Buzzwords Prompted Machine to Deliver Crisps
- Lady Dada
- Summer Reading
- Altermodernism: The Age of Stupid (by Ellie Harrison)
- Ellie Harrison Loves Tea
- Confessions of a Recovering Data Collector
- Five Pointers to Becoming the ‘Perfect Artist’
- How Can We Continue Making Art? (by Ellie Harrison)
- This is Not a Circular
- Ones to Watch
- Braziers International
- Two Years of Tea Blog
- Angel Row Closing Party
- The Obsessives
- New Stars on Broadway
- This is Ellie Harrison
- Prime
- Insignificance
- Day-to-Day Data Review
- Sports Day
- Many Conceptual Artists Have an Unholy Delight in Statistics
- Day-to-Day Data Review
- Under the Data, the Stars
- Day-to-Day Data Exhibitions Preview
- Out of the Ordinary
- Just the Facts...
- Day-to-Day Data Event Preview
- Underground Movement
- Postcard Artist Set to Go Underground
- Gold Adventure
- Not to Be Sneezed at...
- The Big Sneeze
- Artist’s Profile
- LabCulture Feature
- Treat Yourself Review
- A Day in the Life
- Eat Me!
- Eat 22 Events Preview
- Graduate’s Snappy Diet
- Diet Hard
- Little Gems