Tim Noble and Sue Webster - The Work

The Work

Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s work can be divided into the ‘Light Works’ and the ‘Shadow Works’, though Webster does not see them as completely separate. She says:

“We kept them both going side by side. There are two sides to the work; the shiny side and the dark side. That kind of reflects the two personalities within us.”

The influence of music on their art, particularly punk rock, has been of great importance to them since they began their earliest collaborations: Says Noble:

“I think anything that’s a bit of a rocket up the arse, anything that kicks against the routine, against the mundane things that close down your mind, is a refreshing and good thing. Punk did that very successfully . . . it offered a direct and instant means of producing products or things.”

Adds Webster:

“When we make a piece of work we're constantly looking for something that will take our breath away because if it does that to us we've pushed it as far as it will go. We like to look at every different way of making it, it can be very simple or very complicated, but we don't feel satisfied until we've both given it a good going over.”

Sir Norman Rosenthal, the former Exhibitions Secretary of the Royal Academy, writes:

“At the most immediate and most important level, Noble and Webster’s work symbolizes a pair of artists clearly besotted and totally in love with each other, artists who are only interested in picturing themselves: sometimes surrounded by detritus; other times by pastiches of contemporary neon advertising. An antiaesthetic of vulgarity rules on the surface of their work.”