London like never before

'The Great Bear' 1992 - Simon Patterson

   The Great Bear is a four colour offset lithograph, which has then been mounted in an anodisedaluminium frame. It is an altered version of the original map of the London Underground, Patterson has then gone on to replaced the names of the underground stations with the names of engineers, philosophers, explorers, planets, journalists, footballers, musicians, film actors, saints, Italian artists, Chinese scholars, comedians and French kings. Each of these categories is listed next to a coloured line (representing the different train lines) at the bottom right of the image under the title 'Key to Lines'. 
   The names on the map range from the obscure, known only to people with specialised knowledge to the well known figures of popular culture  He has commented:
   'There is no code to be cracked in any of my work. Meanings may not be obvious, you may not get a joke, but nothing is really cryptic - I'm not interested in mystification. I like disrupting something people take as read. I am not simply pulling the rug out from people. I am not nihilistic. What interests me is juxtaposing different paths of knowledge to form more than the sum of their parts.'

   Humour is an obvious and important part of Patterson's work, which is typically based on existing structures (original tube map), with the replacement of their contents. In the piece there are amusing associations which are created at the points where two or more lines or categories intersect, disrupting one series with the interjection of the other.