Rory Pilgrim, ‘Go Find Miracles’, 2025
July 2025 
A short film about the making of Go Find Miracles, a new sound artwork by 2023 Turner Prize-nominated artist Rory Pilgrim for Waterloo station. The work has been developed in collaboration with HMP/YOI Portland and the Prison Choir Project, as well as the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme (CCSaR) and the Feminist Library in Peckham.

​Visit the project page here. 

​Go Find Miracles is a new sound artwork by 2023 Turner Prize-nominated artist Rory Pilgrim for Waterloo station commissioned by Art on the Underground.

This new work emerges from Pilgrim’s long-term work with those affected by the criminal justice system. Recorded in two underground locations, with Go Find Miracles, Pilgrim asks how we go beneath the surface to imagine new structures of repair and possibility.

The work has been developed in collaboration with HMP/YOI Portland and the Prison Choir Project, as well as the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme (CCSaR) and the Feminist Library in Peckham. Go Find Miracles can be heard at Waterloo Underground station along the travelator connecting the Northern and Jubilee lines, between 14-25 July 2025.

Rory Pilgrim works collaboratively and in dialogue with others, across music composition, performance, film, drawing and text, reflecting and redefining how we come together to shape social change.

Go Find Miracles focuses on the role that the Isle of Portland, a small island in the English Channel, has played in shaping London through its quarries. Portland stone has been used to build many of London’s most iconic buildings, including the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral, TfL’s historic headquarters – 55 Broadway, and Waterloo station itself. Trains to and from Portland’s closest station, Weymouth, arrive and depart from Waterloo – which acts as a gateway to the island, whose resources have built so much of the capital.

The Isle of Portland is also the site of two prisons, including HMP/YOI Portland, and the former site of prison barge HMP Weare and the Bibby Stockholm which temporarily housed asylum seekers. The labour of the people imprisoned on the island has historically shaped its landscape, with the many stone quarries originally being worked by imprisoned people who were initially brought to Portland in 1848 to construct the 2.84-mile-long harbour breakwater.
Expanding from Pilgrim’s long-term collaboration with communities on Portland and developed following a workshop at The Feminist Library in London, which used collections of intersectional feminist literature from the 1970s until the present day, Go Find Miracles explores the ways that the law impacts our lives and our environment. Reflecting on the idea of a miracle as an opening for change and a prayer as a sequence of connection through the words we share with each other, the artwork is structured around a call and response prayer.
Go Find Miracles was recorded underground in a Portland stone quarry, amongst the layers in which deep time connects us with our modern world, and on the disused Jubilee line platform at Charing Cross London Underground station: bringing voices from Portland and London together.

The sound work takes the form of a conversation, spoken reflections and poetry by Carina Murray and Holly Upton are accompanied by music composed by Pilgrim and sung by soloist Robyn Haddon, alumni of the Prison Choir Project, and a further choir of singers with whom Pilgrim has previously collaborated for projects including pink & green, 2024 and RAFTS, 2022. The lyrics and melodies of the work have partly been written together with men from HMP/YOI Portland.

Constituting a prayer of call and response that ultimately traces a 10-minute loop without end, Go Find Miracles asks, if we break the loop, is it here we find space for miracles?

Go Find Miracles can be heard alongside visual artworks by Pilgrim depicting songbirds carrying messages between London and Portland. These drawings are installed throughout Waterloo Underground station making visible the listening experience and the ripple of connection between the two places explored in the work.

An expanded leaflet documenting the development of Go Find Miracles is available to collect from the station. A short film by 2025 Jarman award nominees, Other Cinemas, about the making of Go Find Miracles, will be available to view on art.tfl.gov.uk from 21 July 2025.
Go Find Miracles is the third audio commission developed in collaboration with The Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Space’s at Risk programme (CCSaR) to spotlight and amplify grassroots organisations they have supported, and produce audio installations that can be heard across London Underground stations.

Credits
Collaborators: The Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk team, The Feminist Library, HMP/YOI Portland, Learners from HMP/YOI Portland & The Prison Choir Project
Design: Wolfe Hall
Production & facilitation: Elizabeth Graham & Rory Pilgrim
Composition: Rory Pilgrim
Speakers: Carina Murray & Holly Upton
Sound recording & mixing: Lucas August
Sound editing: Nada Smiljanic
Singers: Adam Green, Darren, George, Marcello, Robyn Haddon, Todd Harris, Seraphina D’Arby and Marged Siôn
TfL Colleagues: Fernando Soler & Lota Anyakora
Recorded in an Albion Stone Ltd Portland stone mine on the Isle of Dorset, The Crypt Studio and on the disused Jubilee line platform at Charing Cross Underground station.

​read more....

🎵 Introducing: Meet the Creators 🎵
​
At the Prison Choir Project, we’re privileged to collaborate with some of the UK’s most exceptional musicians—artists who bring not just skill, but compassion and vision to our work within prisons.
Today marks the launch of our new #MeetTheCreators series, where we’ll be highlighting the individuals behind the music. These are the creative minds who generously share their time and talent to inspire change, build community, and bring the power of music to places often forgotten.
We look forward to sharing their stories—and celebrating the vital role of the arts in rehabilitation and transformation.

Pink and Green visit the prison, 2024, Polaroid, 8.8 × 10.7 cm Rory Pilgrim

As part of the programme celebrating 25 years of Art on the Underground, a new sound artwork by 2023 Turner prize nominated artist Rory Pilgrim will be presented at Waterloo station in July. Go Find Miracles has emerged from a forthcoming feature film, titled pink & green; a long-term project working with those affected by the criminal justice system and will feature singers that have been involved with the Prison Choir Project. The work will be heard at Waterloo Underground station along the travelator connecting the Northern and Jubilee lines, between 14-25 July 2025. 


Rory Pilgrim works collaboratively and in dialogue with others, across music composition, performance, film, drawing and text, reflecting and redefining how we come together to shape social change. Go Find Miracles focuses on the role that the Isle of Portland, a small island in the English Channel, has played in shaping London through its quarries. Portland stone has been used to build many of London’s most iconic buildings, including the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral, TfL’s historic headquarters - 55 Broadway, and Waterloo station itself. Trains to and from Portland’s closest station, Weymouth, arrive and depart from Waterloo – which acts as a gateway to the island, whose resources have built so much of the capital. 


The Isle of Portland is also the site of two prisons, HMP/YOI Portland and The Verne, and the former site of prison barge HMP Weare. The labour of the people imprisoned on the island has historically shaped its landscape, with the many stone quarries originally being worked by imprisoned people who were initially brought to Portland in 1848 to construct the 2.84-mile-long harbour breakwater. 
Expanding from Pilgrim’s long-term collaboration with communities on Portland, Go Find Miracles explores the ways that the law impacts our lives and our environment. Reflecting on the idea of a miracle as an opening for change and a prayer as a sequence of connection through the words we share with each other, the artwork will be structured around a call and response prayer. 


Go Find Miracles will be recorded underground in a Portland quarry, amongst the layers in which deep time connects us with our modern world, and on the disused Jubilee line platform at Charing Cross station: bringing voices from Portland and London together. The sound work will take the form of a conversation accompanied by music composed by Pilgrim and sung by soloist Robyn Haddon, alumni of the Prison Choir Project, and a further choir of singers with whom Pilgrim has collaborated for projects including pink & green, 2024 and RAFTS, 2022. The lyrics of the work have been written by men from HMP/YOI Portland and developed following a workshop at the Feminist Library, which used collections of intersectional feminist literature from the 1970s until the present day to reflect on the impact of the law, justice, and resources of repair. Constituting a prayer of call and response that ultimately traces a 10-minute loop without end, Go Find Miracles asks, if cycles of harm can be broken, if we break the loop, is it here we find space for miracles?


Go Find Miracles will be heard alongside visual artworks by Pilgrim depicting songbirds carrying messages between London and Portland. These drawings will be installed throughout Waterloo station and will make visible the listening experience and the ripple of connection between the two places explored in the work. Go Find Miracles will also be accessible through a QR code on a poster campaign across the Underground, extending the connection of the work and those involved across London. An expanded leaflet documenting the development of Go Find Miracles will also be available to collect from the station. 


Art on the Underground’s audio commission series is developed as part of a new strand of collaborative, community art commissioning working with the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme (CCSaR). This programme realises an annual sound commission developed through engagement with the CCSaR programme and the communities around Underground stations to spotlight the work of organisations who face structural barriers to sustaining space in the capital and to create and share resonances from them across the city. The work has been developed in collaboration with The Feminist Library in Peckham, who are a part of the CCSaR programme.
​
About Art on the Underground
Art on the Underground invites artists to create projects for London’s Underground that are seen by millions of people each day, changing the way people experience their city. Incorporating a range of artistic media - from painting, installation, sculpture, digital and performance, to prints and custom Tube map covers - the programme produces critically acclaimed projects that are accessible to all, and which draw together London’s diverse communities. Since its inception, Art on the Underground has presented commissions by UK-based and international artists including Jeremy Deller, Yayoi Kusama, Mark Wallinger, and Tania Bruguera, allowing the programme to remain at the forefront of contemporary debate on how art can shape public space.

About Rory Pilgrim
Rory Pilgrim (Bristol, 1988) works in a wide range of media including songwriting, composing music, film, music video, text, drawing and live performances. Centred on emancipatory concerns, Pilgrim aims to challenge the nature of how we come together, speak, listen and strive for social change through sharing and voicing personal experience. Strongly influenced by the origins of activist, feminist and socially engaged art, Pilgrim works with others through different methods of dialogue, collaboration and workshops. In an age of increasing technological interaction, Rory's work creates connections between activism, spirituality, music and how we form community locally and globally from both beyond and behind our screens.


Recent Solo Shows include: Chisenhale Gallery (2024), Landhuis Oud Amelisweerd - Centraal Museum Utrecht (2024), WAMX, Turku (2022), Kunstverein Braunschweig (duo-2021), Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2020), Between Bridges, Berlin (2019) Ming Studios, Boise (2019), Andriesse-Eyck Gallery, Amsterdam NL (2018) and South London Gallery (2018). In 2019, Pilgrim was the winner of the Prix de Rome and was in 2023 nominated for the Turner Prize. 


About pink & green
pink & green is a forthcoming feature film, which follows an exhibition of the same name presented at Chisenhale Gallery from 17 May – 21 July, 2024. Returning to early forms of cinema as a magic lantern, Pilgrim transformed the gallery into a film yet to be inscribed on screen – with a screenplay brought to life through drawing, sound and light. The long-term project is produced by Elizabeth Graham, and the feature film produced by SMARTHOUSE, supported by De Verbeelding – a collaboration between the Mondriaan Fund and the Netherlands Film Fund.


About the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme 
The Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme (CCSaR) is the only GLA programme focussed on safeguarding existing spaces across London - protecting both their social and economic value.  They provide expertise to help protect against threats to London’s cultural and community-led spaces, and directly support organisations to save spaces at risk. The Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme (CCSaR) is working with Art on the Underground on an innovative new project which will spotlight the grassroots organisations they have supported to produce audio installations that can be heard across London Underground stations.  The intention of the project is to amplify and spotlight the work organisations do.   

Would you like to do this again?
​‘1,000,000,000%’

Pulp Fiction isn’t just a movie—it’s a cinematic adrenaline shot straight to the heart. Directed by Quentin Tarantino, this 1994 cult classic weaves together a series of interlocking crime stories drenched in razor-sharp dialogue, dark humour, and bursts of stylized violence..........

So began our recent project at HMP Wormwood Scrubs began with an electrifying performance of iconic songs from films such as Trainspotting, Pulp Fiction, and Saturday Night Fever. With surtitles projected at the back of the Chapel, the men were able to set aside their lyric sheets and fully immerse themselves in a powerful and committed performance.
The Chapel was alive with energy, filled with staff members and men from the wings, all sharing in a palpable sense of positivity and celebration.
We were privileged to be joined by four exceptional professional musicians—Tim Rose (guitar), Sam Burgess (bass), Rob Taggart (piano), and Luke Tomlinson (drums)—whose talents provided a dynamic foundation for the men's remarkable performance.
Feedback from the men below:

‘Being in the choir makes me so happy and helps a lot while being in Prison. It gives us hope that there is good in this world…'
‘Please request for more choir groups to take place more often’
‘We feel better about our situation and makes me want to live’
‘I enjoyed everything, the people the bonding’
‘Benefit is to interact with others you wouldn’t normally talk to’
’Self confidence, self esteem’
‘Everyone’s efforts towards this project has motivated me… I like the energy it gives everybody’
‘I’d like to do this on the outside’
‘It brings you towards God and makes a true bond and love for everyone’
‘I’ve never really spoken to anyone on the wing before. This cheered me up and I slept better'
‘I had real fun reminding me I don’t need to be high or drunk to sing and dance… this is just what I needed’
‘I am going to find something like this on the outside to help me’

Many thanks to everyone involved - especially the men for their enthusiasm and commitment to this project.