Gateshead

Metro Tunnel Gateshead to Newcastle

2005

‘Space Travel’ is a sequence of 115 edited images which describe, like a series of film stills, a journey up and through a deserted multi-storey car park.

Reproduced onto large light reflective panels they are viewable through the Metro carriage windows as the train accelerates into the tunnel leaving Gateshead Station. Sometimes they will be glimpsed as individual images and at others they will read like a short animated film strip.

Through the artist’s sequencing of the images, using close up and perspective viewpoints, the ascent through the multi storey car park from ground to roof level can be seen from the train.

‘Space Travel’ sets up comparisons between a real journey within an internalised space which ends in daylight (the train passing through the tunnel) and a perceived journey which, moving up a series of ramps to the daylight, contradicts the linear, horizontal path of the train.

Tunnels and car parks are not destinations, they are ‘spaces between places’, and in Elizabeth Wright’s work she uses the fleeting moment to question the significance of such ‘non places’.