Simon Patterson

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/explore/art/new-visions/simon-patterson

Simon is a Goldsmith’s graduate, born in England in 1967. His best known work is “the Great Bear” completed in 1992, a subversion of the London Underground map, where station names are replaced by the names of philosophers, film stars, politicians and other celebrities.

Courtesy the artist and Haunch of Venison © Simon Patterson and Transport for LondonReworkings of diagrams and maps are a regular occurrence in Patterson’s practice. The Great Bear (1992) departs from Harry Beck’s London Underground map, inserting a rupture between information and its representation. In this instantly recognizable chart, physical distances are inaccurate yet navigational relationships are communicated with the greatest clarity. In this artwork, named after the Ursa Major constellation, the East London Line becomes ‘Planets’, the Victoria line ‘Italian Artists’ and British Rail ‘Thirty Comedians’. One can travel from Venus to Captain Cook with only one change at Kate Adie, or from Columbus to Kierkegaard to board the mainline train at Oliver Reed. In reading these seemingly unlinked names, one cannot help but draw on memory and imagination to try and make sense of this renamed world where time, space and understanding collapse and reform anew. Visually the map appears to be familiar but inspection reveals an entirely different system. This, though, is a second untruth: the map today is obsolete. In 1992 the East London Line ran from Shoreditch to New Cross and the DLR stopped at the north bank of the Thames. A similar subversion takes place in Cosmic Wallpaper (2002) – seemingly a star chart communicating a school-book representation of cosmology in wallpaper form. Scrutiny shows that it is not the skies above that are being communicated but a portrait of the heavy-rock band Deep Purple, charting their line-up changes, spin-offs, groupies and outputs. In The Great Bear and Cosmic Wallpaper, Patterson reveals the ways both his sources and modified versions portray objectivity as an approximation that is hampered by an inevitable future obsolescence.

Other pices of his work that I found interesting are:

The Undersea World and Other Stories; The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

It opened in spring 2008 with its main themes central to the collections and research at the National Maritime Museum (NMM). The Museum unpacks the material cultures that result from human attempts to find their place in the world, be it mapping the skies above, the ocean depths below, or seeking relationships across time and space. Such structures form frameworks of understanding that are bounded by limits of knowledge and distributed through language.