MTR Crossrail has commissioned me various art projects for the urban re-qualification of selected Crossrail’s stations that connect the East End to the centre of London.
Mademoiselle Maurice is an established street artist who works mainly with origami and tiles, creating colourful spaces of abstractions in cities all around the world.
All her production it’s based on the urban necessity to break the everyday monotony with an invasion of colours. It also it questions the human nature and people’s interaction with the environment. Her artistic reasons matched perfectly the willing of the curator of the project, who wanted to commission an artwork that would give priority to the regeneration of the rail station of Maryland, London.Her new mural, titled Rainbow Road covers platform 1 of the station.
It is composed with more than a thousand tiles, all hand painted with a rainbow colour palette.
The two straight lines framing the composition seem not to begin or end anywhere. Is the trajectory of a train that continue its journey through the day. Between the lines is an explosive ultra colourful composition of tiles, repeated three times.
The motif for the mural was inspired by Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot”, where two people wait endlessly in a station for someone who never arrives. The piece questions the importance – or unimportance – of time. Is time spent waiting meaningless? The two compositions embody Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for Godot; they also represent each and every person waiting in a station every single day.
With Rainbow Road Maurice wants to look at the tiles composing the mural as train passengers and dedicate her wall to them: “Some colours for all the travellers: for joy and hope, for love and unity. More than a thousand tiles, all different but all the same“.
This site specific artwork is part of a vast urban regeneration program on a MTR Crossrail commission.