Piccadilly’s Peccadilloes | rutbleesluxemburg.com

Piccadilly’s Peccadilloes, a public art installation at Heathrow Terminal 4 underground station

commissioned by Art on the Underground in 2007.

The work focuses on 12 classic stations designed by Charles Holden, channeling the underground’s iconic Johnston font reflected in glossy-wet pavement surfaces. The changes in surface and architectural structure frame the fragmented texts and absorb the essence of Holden’s designs.

Piccadilly’s Peccadilloes was a complete circuit around the London Underground ticket hall

at Heathrow, which established a gateway to enter and leave the city.

Douglas Park reading his commisioned poem 'Shifted Blockage Flowing Load' for the opening of Piccadilly’s Peccadilloes.

Shifted Blockage Flowing Load

Vast expanses overstretch until pulled too far exceeding beyond maximum limits that suddenly there’s fast-speed contraction and shrinkage inward. Original size and form reduce and decrease, leaving mere fractions of their previous mass and bulk they once were. No longer endlessly continual and unbroken masses, but defined and locatable compact units. Along outer-edges, coastal-beach riverbank seashore canal-towpath cliffs surround and picture-frame innermost

civic-centre and forest-clearing at the very heart; nothing or little lies between moat and castle-keep.

Distantly underneath, every solid factory-chimney divulges secrets, yet always in encrypted code states, so otherwise everything might just as well have been withheld or unavailable instead. Messages enter, some stay, others evaporate or implode, many even orbit around. Case-subjects undergo changes, within themselves, also enacting such processes onto anything, body or where else met with. All the rest spill out the other side, rejected and escaping; different than beforehand, never the same again, without turning back anymore, only facing advancement and progress ahead.

Dreams extend, burnt through armour-plated rock-face shields; exposing fresh, healthy, alive and seemingly newborn soft bodily tissue and internal organs; wounded injuries and healing bandage dressings confuse, unresolved, interchangeable. Countless visions projected fall, sent straight back down again, drowning and buried, lost inside these wishing-wells; still more get forcibly thrown high up, landing, stuck, lodged. Unfilled graves flood deep, as does each hollow column pillar capital ship-mast. Eventual conclusion awaits discovery or invention required for validity and activating.