Tracey Emin unveils Tube map design

Tracey Emin is the latest artist to unveil her design for the pocket Tube map at the London Transport Museum today.

Emin’s map is the 16th in a series of covers designed by artists such as Michael Landy, Yayoi Kusama, Jeremy Deller and David Shrigley.

Transport for London said Emin has ‘adapted the iconography of the original map to reflect her personal experience of the network and her ideas and experience of place’.

The Map cover’s title is ‘The Central line’, but the only stations marked on this line are Oxford Circus, Liverpool Street and, as a personal extension, Shoreditch High Street, showing the artist’s personal use of the line to take her from her East End home to the West End.

The Central and Northern lines ‘have sprouted leaves, to accommodate the bird, a recurrent motif in Emin’s work, which is often seen as a self-portrait’.

Her design will appear on 18 million pocket Tube maps, the largest print run of the maps to date, to be circulated during the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, available in stations from June 2012.

This new Tube map cover artwork will be featured as part of the London Transport Museum’s Summer show Mind the Map: Inspiring Art, Design and Cartography, 18 May-28 October 2012.

Tracey Emin, said: “When people look at the Tube map I want them to smile and feel reassured.”