The splintered world of Noble and Webster

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Rosalind Ormiston reviews 'Nihilistic Optimistic' at London's Blain/Southern Gallery

In their first major solo exhibition in London since 2006, Tim Noble and Sue Webster have curated a series of shadow self-portraits,‘Nihilistic Optimistic’ (on display until 24 November 2012), at the new Blain/Southern Gallery in Hanover Square, London.

Leaving behind their familiar method of using recognizable objects to create artworks, Noble and Webster’s six portraits are created from off-cuts of wood carpentry that are nailed, glued, screwed or jammed into wooden step ladders, the starting point and main prop of each piece. The debris of sawdust and shavings and tools that litter the floor around each work creates a sense of immediacy: of a work just finished, or still in progress. What intrigues is how these bits and pieces of discarded wood – splinters of chair legs, and irregular wood shapes – are fused together to create spectacular shadow-likenesses of the artists. It’s a stunning ‘how did they do that’ effect, which highlights the mastery behind Noble and Webster’s body of work.

The wooden constructions, Noble and Webster call them ‘street compositions’, which create the images, look like prehistoric animals, 3–8ft long, some with elongated knobbly spines. The use of back projection throws ‘strike a pose’ shadows onto the wall space and what emerges are giant, twice life-size figures of the artists, dramatically highlighted in the darkened gallery space. Here, Noble and Webster are represented both together and alone; they sit on chairs facing away from each other (on chairs that don’t exist) in Wild Mood Swings (2009–10); or stand alone, as in The Individual (2012), or Youngman (2012), with each crease in their jeans or flick of their hair recreated to perfection; the synergy between the self-portraits and the artists is visually present, like a 21st-century conversation piece.

The exhibition’s title, ‘Nihilistic Optimistic’, is intended to highlight oppositional forces, both in the artists and in the works. At its simplest understanding it is both constructive and deconstructive; a force of light and shadow; of form and absence of form; figurative work formed from an abstract concept. It is mesmeric show. Tim Noble explained how the series came to be:

This particular set of works evolved quite emotionally. We kind of almost thought it was going to be the end of the shadows, we got quite well known for that; then it started to happen for us. If you look at the kind of materials involved, they are getting more and more fractured, more and more splintered. The more you start picking things up like splinters of a chair leg, things you can’t quite identify with, the more it gets really exciting, and the more we suddenly got back into it...When you approach it, you work harder; splinters are just the essence of life, small things make great big clusters, huge energies.

What one gets from this show is the essence of why Noble and Webster work together; they have to be driven; it has to work for both of them in spite of different approaches to the same subject. This approach could be summed up in My Beautiful Mistake (2012), the sculpture that stands in Blain Southern’s Entrance Gallery. At nearly 12 feet high, it is created from a wheelbarrow, two chairs, a stool, books, a tube of paint plus pencil, wood, rubber, steel and cotton sheeting. It is a precision piece of work, it looks perilously unsafe, and a lot of fun to make; and those factors may sum up what brought about this exciting new solo show.

Noble would like ‘Nihilistic Optimistic’ to travel to other galleries but the works are for sale too, either individually or as a series. A fascinating catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with contributions by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gustave Metzger and Jon Savage. And for the Noble &Webster collectors, in collaboration with The Vinyl Factory, the artists have produced a limited edition artwork, a 10-inch record.