Go Find Miracles

​Prison Choir Project singers to feature on a new sound artwork to be presented at Waterloo Station between 14-25 July 2025.

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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.
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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.   

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