Jacqueline Poncelet’s, Wrapper, at Edgware Road Tube station, is the largest vitreous enamel artwork in Europe, consisting of a large mosaic grid of over 700 panels cladding 1500-sq. metres of London Underground’s new building. Poncelet researched and observed the local history and the natural environment, the area’s architecture and its communities. Through this process a synthesis of abstract patterning and colour produced an artwork that merged with the architectural form. Design elements were influenced by the history of the area, its overlapping transport systems, waterways, architecture, people, and the colours of London Underground’s Tube map. Wrapper tells the story of the place as each pattern relates to a different part of the local area. Poncelet uses patterns and colours as storytellers and each configuration has a particular place and purpose in the overall composition, replicating the complex of elements of the urban environment.
“Pattern can identify different cultures at a glance, can suggest other places, can conjure varieties of feeling, can change expectation, relieve boredom and calm what is cluttered”. Jacqueline Poncelet
Jacqueline Poncelet was a renowned ceramicist in the 1970s and 80s. In the 90s she became Increasingly collaborative in her practice and diversified to include painting, sculpture and public art commissions, often working with architects. A recent collaboration included design work for the Child Development Unit at Guys and St Thomas’ Hospital, London.
A second commission for the Edgware Road underground station is Everything Meets Here by Jessie Brennan, a minutely detailed 3-metre long pencil drawing of an imaginary landscape, a reproduction of which is situated in the entrance to the station. The work was inspired by the research processes Poncelet used in Wrapper, and developed with the St Marylebone Society, local residents, photography students and London Underground staff. The work reflects Brennan’s interest in the exchange of local knowledge and personal experiences, memories, folklore and myths, between herself and the people within a particular place, situation or context.
Jessie Brennan is an artist-educator who lives and works in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2007 and has since exhibited nationally and internationally, and in 2011 was Second Prize Winner of the Jerwood Drawing Prize.
Art on the Underground provides a programme of contemporary art for London Undeground. This incorporates temporary and permanent commissions displayed on stations throughout the network; large scale single station sites such as Gloucester Road; a series of commissions for the front cover of the Pocket Tube map; a film programme at Canary Wharf station; and a programme of Tube line-based commissions, which revolve around a particular theme. The Tube line series has so far included the Piccadilly line,(Thin Cities) the Jubilee line (One Thing Leads to Another – Everything is Connected) and the Central line (Central Line Series).
Image: Jacqueline Poncelet, Wrapper. Vitreous enamel. Edgware Road (Circle line) Underground station, London. Commissioned and produced by Art on the Underground, 2012. Photograph © Thierry Bal
Permanent installation from 20 November 2012. The vitreous enamel panels were produced and installed by A.J.Wells based on the Isle of Wight, UK.
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