Tim Noble and Sue Webster

 

Relevance to my work:

This duo use a variety of different scrap pieces, such as old stuffed animals and scrap metal, to create sculptures which create shadows. This fragile method of working reflects the title of one of my whiteboard drawings – ‘My days are like an evening shadow’ – and the temporality of life. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s work derives much of its power from its fusion of opposites: male-female, light-dark, craft-rubbish, sex-violence and form versus anti form. This fusion could not be seen more clearly than in the emblematic transformative art of their projections. Thye create extraordinary porjectison which bear great likesness to something identifiable (including self-portraits) by directing light on assemblages made upof everyday objects such as rubbish.

This process of transformation echoes the idea of ‘perceptual psychology’. This is a form of evaluation used for psychological patients. Noble and Webster are familiar with this process and how people evaluate abstract forms. Throughout their careers they have played with the idea of how humans perceive abstract images and define them with meaning. The result is surprising and powerful as it redefines how abstract forms can transform into figurative ones.”

 

ALL VISUAL ARTS. (2011).Vanitas: The Transience of Earthly Pleasures. All Visual Arts: London.

 

 

Pg 14-15

“Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s extraordinary contemporary work, British Wildlife, 2008, is a shadow-sculpture divided into two areas of interest: a mass of taxidermied animals producing a densely packed still-life, and an exquisitely detailed, profiled portrait in shadow of the artists (perhaps narcissistically depicted as forever ‘in the spotlight’), produced by the strong beam projected upon the clustered carcasses. As with their other work on view, Metal Fucking Rats with Heart-shaped Tail (in which a heap of inanimate metals projects a very living picture of romancing rats), in this contemporary vanitas the realms of the living and of the dead are firmly delineated: the ‘dead’ mass of animal bodies or scrap metal here on the floor, and the ‘living’ shadow portrait here on the wall. The vanitas painting was sometimes plainly composed of two distinctly separate ontological realms, one-half picturing death, the other half life. One thinks of Adrien van Utrecht’s Vanitas Still Life, 1643, which is divided rigidly in two, the right half overflowing with material abundance, the left stark in comparison, centring on the skull. A single lock of golden hair curls as if crossing from one world to the other – hair being perhaps a part of the body that is both living and dead, able to bridge these two worlds. The vanitas was often pushing past its own boundaries to invade our space, witnessed in paintings which seem to escape the painted frame. Noble and Webster’s piece literally expands into our space, as we likewise project our own shadows on the wall alongside theirs.

In some ways Noble and Webster’s work is perpetually on the verge of dying, or vanishing: one need only pull the plug and these pitch-perfect double portraits are gone (‘our days upon earth are like a shadow…’). In this way British Wildlife is a precious but inherently unstable object, not unlike the piles of fruits or jewels in the old paintings, balanced at the edge of a tablecloth and forever on the brink of tumbling to the floor – perhaps right out of the picture. The heaping of rare things (such as the accumulation of taxidermied animals, a collection which Noble inherited from his father) relates to the vanitas’ love of stuffing its paintings with a flood of objects. Then as now, the mass of animal bodies or mounds of gold are meant to overwhelm us with the power of sheer abundance… Contemporary artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster manage paradoxically to turn such material excess in their work into a dematerialized shadow picture, perpetually on the verge of disappearing.”

 

ALL VISUAL ARTS. (2011).Vanitas: The Transience of Earthly Pleasures. All Visual Arts: London.