The sensory world of the London Tube is brought vividly to life in a new immersive exhibition at Guildhall Art Gallery, uniting painter Jock McFadyen RA with musician
and composer Jem Finer of The Pogues.
Opening on 27 February, ‘Jock McFadyen and Jem Finer: Underground (and Surface)’ transforms the gallery into a meeting point of image and sound, where vast paintings of Tube stations and London cityscapes are animated by layered field recordings from the capital’s rail network.
The exhibition revisits McFadyen’s ‘Underground’ series, first conceived in the late 1990s, now reimagined through a collaboration with Finer and co-curated by Guildhall Art Gallery director Elizabeth Scott. Familiar signage, tunnels and platforms dissolve into shadowy, unsettling spaces in works such as ‘Bank’ and ‘Ghost’, blurring the line between recognition and abstraction. These darker interiors are balanced by expansive cityscapes above ground, including ‘Popular Enclosure’, with its calm skies and cooler palette.
Each painting is linked site-specifically to a Tube station and paired with Finer’s sound compositions, created from recordings on the Northern and Central lines. The resulting soundscape mixes mechanical rhythms with melodic fragments: the creak of carriages, the groan of rails, the half-recognisable pips and pulses of everyday commuting. Together, image and sound turn the Underground into what the artists describe as a “living, breathing organism”.
Chairman of the City of London Corporation’s Culture, Heritage, and Libraries, Brendan Barns, said: “Jock McFadyen’s consummate skill in presenting epic views of the capital which, at the same time, convey a sense of intimacy, as well as beauty and decay, are sure to engage and impress visitors.
“Adding Jem Finer’s atmospheric soundscapes from the Tube network to the mix is particularly intriguing, and it will undoubtedly make for a very memorable experience.”
Jock McFadyen said: “Many of us descend daily into the tunnels and carriages that offer rapid access to distant parts of our urban world.
"We see and hear a remarkable variety of things there, but how often do we pay attention to the graffiti-daubed exteriors, the rails, pipes, struts, and wires that adorn the surface of the spaces through which we pass? How often do we really listen to all the mysterious mechanical and organic sounds that emanate from the subterranean caverns that house our public transport?
“I’m honoured that Jem has contributed such a beautiful soundtrack to my Underground series, one that is far superior to my original idea of a simple raw recording of closing doors, announcements, and the rattling and grinding of rails. It is a wonderful haunting piece, which seems to unfold with new sounds every time I hear it.”
Jem Finer said: “I hoped to find a resonance with Jock’s paintings where the figurative dissolves into abstraction. I remembered him writing “All paintings are abstract. The subject of all my paintings is the paint”. I feel the same way about sound… about it being the focus of composing.
“For me, the form is important, but the sound is the true subject. I started to flip Jock’s thinking and work with the sounds I’d recorded in the way that he might work with paint, transformed just far enough that there remains a trace of familiarity while becoming something unexpected, newly discovered.”
The exhibition continues Guildhall Art Gallery’s ‘Pay What You Can’ admission scheme, following its success in recent shows. The gallery forms part of the City of London Corporation’s wider Destination City strategy, aimed at strengthening the Square Mile as a cultural destination.
The Corporation invests more than £130m annually in arts and heritage and oversees institutions including the Barbican Centre, Tower Bridge and Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Photo by tompagenet (Tom Page), Wikimedia commons.