Our Pink Depot: The Gay Underground FLO-N202-236000000- TRK-MST-00002-SAY- HELLO-WAVE-GOODBYE- KEN-NIE-BPS is a set of works developed through a long term commission with Art on the Underground (2017-2019). Incorporating posters, text works, performances and an artist book, the art works emerged from spending time with miners, civil engineers, train drivers and former gay clubbers. It is entirety, the project proposed that the new Northern Line underground tunnels should be nominated a ‘pink depot’, indicating the need to create new queer spaces at sites where former LGBTQ+ nightlife has now disappeared, and re-using a historic term used by underground staff.

By developing cyanotypes using the last hours of light before the new tunnels were sealed from the sky, posters were created which were installed on every station on the Northern Line. By bringing together, both on the cyanotype and in performances, the overlapping worlds at the site of the new tunnels, the project proposed fictional interchanges between LGBTQ+ worlds and other sites and infrastructures. 

The first artwork was a sound work documenting a collaborative performance of interview materials respoken in the live engineering tunnelling site in collaboration with King Frankie Sinatra (Karen Fisch), and included a DJ set.  Further performances from the project took place at Matt’s Gallery and a reworked performance was commissioned for the exhibition ‘Blueprints of Hope’ in 2023. 

The artist book The Gay Underground FLO-N202-236000000-TRK-MST-00002-SAY-HELLO-WAVE-GOODBYE-KEN-NIE-BPS (BookWorks, 2019) convened and interwove materials from interviews, archival and personal photos and an artist statement of a trackwalk, undertaken so that the first drivers to pass along the new underground tunnels were LGBTQ+. 

Text by Veronica Simpson on “Our Pink Depot”