Ever feel like you are waiting for a train that never comes? That’s what Katrina Palmer wants you to experience in her latest exhibition, The Necropolitan Line, at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds (until 21 February 2016).
Palmer has recreated a train station platform, complete with raised concrete paving, aluminium seats and a bright yellow painted safety line. The viewer becomes an unintentional commuter, flicking through the fictional newspaper The Line, listening to loudspeaker announcements and watching the signal-box light change from white to red.
The exhibition is Palmer’s first institutional commission, having worked almost exclusively on site-specific projects throughout her career. She says it was challenging to adapt to working in a confined gallery space. “At first I didn’t know what to do so I turned off the lights and walked through the rooms and started to come up with ideas,” she says.
The Henry Moore Institute describes itself as having an "elastic notion of sculpture" and Palmer’s works certainly stretch a traditional definition. A complex layering of images and sounds, as well as archival, printed and sculptural elements, Palmer’s exhibition has more in common with an interactive performance.
The inspiration for the project is the London Necropolis Railway—a train service that was in use between 1854 and 1941 that connected London’s Waterloo station to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, western Europe’s largest necropolis. With one-way tickets bought for coffins and return tickets for mourners, the strange, dead-end journey was the starting point for the artist’s thoughts on platforms as “a site for departures, beginnings and endings… as well as expectation and anticipation”.
An unexpected highlight of the show comes at every hour on the hour when an attendant gathers visitors into a bright yellow industrial elevator that plays an unsettling remix of the song Is That All There Is? The doors open onto the street outside the museum. “It’s like descending into reality, but also a bit like the descent into hell,” Palmer says.