Anne Noble

Biography:

Born 1954, Whanganui. Educated Erskine College, Island Bay Wellington, Wanganui Girls College and Elam School of Fine Arts (MFA 1st class hons).

Anne Noble is one of New Zealand’s most respected photographers. Her substantial body of work spans landscape, documentary and installations that incorporate both still and moving images. She often works in series enabling her to explore the medium and its possibilities in great depth.

Since 2001, Noble has been researching and photographing Antarctica. She is exploring the cultural construction of place through imagination and depiction. Moving away from the traditional photographer’s role as companion to exploratory and surveying teams, and questioning the tendency to frame the Antarctic landscape as heroic, picturesque or sublime, Noble is searching for appropriate forms of representation in light of our current, rather than historical, relationship to place.

In 1998, Noble embarked on a series of photographs of Ruby’s room (Anne’s daughter), her toys, and spectacular close-ups of her mouth. The works expand Ruby’s mouth in many guises to a scale that is at once scary, comical and heroic. Lush, large, and electric in colour, the photographs are of imaginary disembodied physical and sensory experience.

In 2001 The Dunedin Public Art Gallery curated a major retrospective of her work. The resulting exhibition States of Grace, toured New Zealand 2001–2003. In 2005 and 2006 her work featured in exhibitions at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, in Berlin and the Patio Herreriano in Spain.

 

https://www.thearts.co.nz/artists/anne-noble

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Noble

 

Anne Noble
No Vertical Song
29 May – 4 July 2015
As part of the Auckland Festival of Photography, Two Rooms presents No Vertical
Song by Anne Noble, a signature exhibition by one of New Zealand’s pre-eminent
contemporary photographers. Noble’s substantial body of work spans landscape,
documentary and installation. Often working in series, she becomes completely
immersed in her subject, enabling her to explore the medium and its possibilities
in depth.
A result of a newfound passion for beekeeping, Noble has become “preoccupied
with learning about bees and understanding the hive, how it functions and its
significance for the larger ecosystem that we are a part of.” Her most recent
photographic project Song Sting Swarm began in 2013 with an exhibition at Two
Rooms. A Senior Fulbright fellowship at Columbia College, Chicago in 2014,
allowed her to continue this project. No Vertical Song is the latest installment,
showcasing 15 photographic portraits of dead bees, called the Dead Bee Portraits.
These works are installed as if populating an imaginary museum of the bee, for a
time when the bee no longer exists. The artist’s concern with the worldwide
decline of the honeybee results in an exhibition that is a haunting and elegiac
reminder of the importance of our relationship to the natural world.
Using a microscope to function as a camera rather than a scientific instrument,
Noble fuses art and science to illuminate an issue she cares about deeply. In order
to align both aesthetic and scientific modes of observation and representation,
Noble invented her own microscopic imaging tools and also worked alongside
scientists using advanced electronic scanning machines. In a process that could
be regarded as even more alchemic than silver based photography, the portraits
were made with a scanning electron microscope – an image making process that
employs an electron beam that is stimulated by the element gold. The resulting
works involve the use of light from the visible and invisible spectrums to create
images that seek to encourage a connection to animals, insects and ecosystems.
Anne Noble is a pioneer of photographic practice in New Zealand. Professor of
Fine Arts (Photography) at Massey University Wellington, she was awarded the
New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to photography in 2003, she was
made an Arts Foundation Laureate in 2009, and in 2014 received a Senior
Fulbright Scholarship. In May 2015, Noble won the prestigious Overseas
Photographer Award at the 31st Higashikawa Awards, Hokkaido, Japan.