Tim Noble and Sue Webster - Shadow Sculptures

Shadow Sculptures

The Shadow Sculptures incorporate diverse materials including household rubbish, scrap metal and taxidermy animals. By shining light onto these assemblages they are transformed into highly accurate shadow profiles of the artists.

Discussing their shadow works, Webster commented: “Our work is incredibly unsocial. There has to be complete darkness because you need to give the light and then to take it away again.”

Their first shadow sculpture, ‘Miss Understood and Mr Meanor’, 1997 (right), came into existence through experimentation with the assemblage of personal items and domestic trash. The silhouettes are formed by lights shining on mounds of rubbish, which includes broken sunglasses and pin badges for rock bands. In this particular work the artist's heads are severed and impaled on stakes. The work was destroyed in the 2004 Momart warehouse fire, along with a number of other well-known works from the Saatchi Collection.

Through their shadow sculptures they managed to fuse the abstract and the representational, a pursuit that consumed the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon. This became even more apparent with their second major shadow sculpture, ‘Dirty White Trash (with Gulls)’, 1998 (left), which expanded the innovations of ‘Miss Understood and Mr Meanor’. This work is composed of a new kind of self-portrait, sculpted out of six months’ worth of the artists’ rubbish; the remains of everything they needed to survive during the time it took to make the work. A single light source illuminates the pile of rubbish thus casting a portrait in shadow, which contrasts sharply with the materials used to create it; the artists leaning against each other, back to back, enjoying a glass of wine and a cigarette.

Jeffrey Deitch, the director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, writes:

“Dirty White Trash (with Gulls) is a confluence of beauty and filth, form and anti-form. It is a work of art made out of the process of its own conception, an embodiment of formalist logic. At the same time, it is a negation of everything that formalism stands for…The artist is at the center of the work. It is deliberately entertaining, and revels in its own theatricality.”

Another work, ‘British Wildlife’ was created after Noble’s father died in 2000. Using his collection of taxidermy animals, it is an assemblage of forty-six birds, forty mammals, and two stuffed fish, including a whole swan and even the pet crow Noble kept as a child. The shadow formed by this mass of animals fittingly depicts back to back busts of the artists in a pose of grief.

In September 2000, they were invited to participate in ‘Apocalypse’, the Royal Academy’s follow up to the infamous Sensation exhibition of 1997. For this they presented ‘The Undesirables’, which comprises a mountain of detritus collected from outside Tim and Sue’s house with a shadow image of the artists hovering above. The appearance of a huge pile of rubbish in one of the largest galleries within the Royal Academy was intentionally radical and shocking, created to challenge viewers’ assumptions about art.

In 2006, an exhibition of their work was held at the Freud Museum, entitled ‘Polymorphous Perverse’.'Black Narcissus', a sculpture made of black silicone casts of Webster’s fingers and Noble’s penis in various states of arousal, was placed in Sigmund Freud’s study next to a bust of Freud himself. When illuminated the sculpture cast a double profile portrait of the artists, illustrating how sexuality influences our perception of reality reflecting the sexuality that Freud discovered at the core of human life. Another work, 'Scarlett', 2006 (see below video on 'External link') was a "worktable on which numerous bizarre mechanical toys are working and seemingly in the process of being made; a nightmarish setting of repressed sexual and sadomasochistic fantasies and transgressions."