Computer game style art display coming to Gloucester Road tube station

The disused platform at Gloucester Road Underground station is set to get a major new art exhibition, with the first public commission by the British artist Heather Phillipson.

Phillipson works in video, sculpture, online media, music, drawing, poetry and what she calls walk-in collages.

Relationships between human and non-human animals are a recurring theme in her work and for this commission she will focus on the egg as an object of reproduction, subject to human interference. In her space-filling sculptural and video installation for Gloucester Road’s disused platform, Phillipson will use video game-style layout techniques to magnify eggs and avian body-parts to monstrous proportions.

Phillipson said that “using the bold, simplified visual techniques of early computer gaming graphics, both stylistically and as an organising principle, the passing platform becomes a sequence of overlapping vulnerabilities and escape tactics, in which so-called human and avian – winner/loser – roles might reverse.”

Assembled across the disused platform, this work will feature various large-scale fiberglass sculptures including two 4-metre-high 3D eggs, a huge automated whisk, twelve 65” video screens and 16 printed panels alongside oversized suspended images. Computer game aesthetics featuring egg sandwiches, scientific diagrams of chicken foetuses, and tomato ketchup and custard tarts speeding through sci-fi graphics, suggest a present tense of menace and dominion.

Phillipson’s commission will be unveiled on 7 June 2018, and will fill the 80m platform at Gloucester Road for a year.

As an extension of this work, Phillipson will create a sequence of images and slogans on the vinyl panels which run the length of the escalator panels at Notting Hill Gate and Bethnal Green stations.