WELLINGTON ARTIST ANNE NOBLE WINS ARTS LAUREATE AWARD

Wellington photographer Anne Noble has won one of the Art Foundation’s  
prestigious Laureate Awards and her current Wellington exhibition of  
‘pee’ flags in Antarctica clearly demonstrates the qualities that have  
led to the award and that attract so much international attention.
[The Arts Foundation of New Zealand describes the Laureate Awards as  
an investment in excellence. Annually, five exceptional New Zealand  
artists are awarded $50,000 each in recognition of their artistic  
achievements and as a challenge to continue working at high levels.  
The 2009 Awards are being announced at a ceremony in Auckland tonight.]

Anne Noble’s photography is arresting, provocative, cerebral and  
amusing says gallery director Alison Bartley of Bartley + Company Art,  
the gallery showing Noble’s new work.

A large four by two metre billboard, featuring Noble’s photograph  
Spoolhenge, in the courtyard outside the galley in Ghuznee Street is  
certainly attracting the attention of passers-by. The dramatic  
photograph of cable spools in the snow on a sunny day in Antarctica  
works like so much of Noble’s photography to disrupt what we might  
expect to see in a photograph of Antarctica – there’s not an iceberg  
or penguin in sight. With similar wit inside the gallery, six  
photographs of pee flags at remote field camps show the human presence  
in a continent that has never been a place of permanent human  
habitation.

Noble has called these images Aurina which is Vulgar Latin for the  
word urine and is derived from aurum meaning the colour gold. The  
exhibition is thus titled The Colour of Gold and plays off the  
connotations of gold – its beauty and its power, seduction and lure.

Noble says she was drawn to photograph the pee flags because the flash  
of yellow seemed so incongruous in that environment – a colour that  
never occurs naturally there.

“They are in the first glance beautiful but they also provide a  
context for discussion about photography's claims on beauty, about how  
we know beauty through that which isn’t considered beautiful and the  
human marking of territory and creation of 'place'. At the heart of my  
project is a desire to disturb the way Antarctica is imagined and  
represented. I am not interested in recreating the kinds of  
photographs of Antarctica that we already know, “ Noble says.

“Noble’s photography is exciting,” Bartley says, “because as well as  
making you think about whatever it is she is photographing, it makes  
you think about how we see, and how photography operates in the world  
by selecting what is shown or not shown. Her work is about photography  
as much as it is about Antarctica.”

Anne Noble has been researching and photographing Antarctica since  
2001. It is a project that has taken her to Antarctic centres all over  
the world in an investigation of how our knowledge of Antarctica is  
shaped through imagination and representation. In 2008 she won a  
prestigious US National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Award  
to travel and work in Antarctica to complete this project. There were  
97 applicants for six awards and she was the only recipient from  
outside the United States. The images in this exhibition come from  
that trip.

Her other recent major series, Ruby’s Room, has attracted considerable  
international attention for its highly original depiction of  
childhood. This series was selected by the Musée du Quai Branly in  
Paris as the keynote contemporary photography exhibition for the  
inaugural Paris PhotoQuai Biennale of Photography in 2007.

Anne Noble has been described as “one of New Zealand photography’s  
most subtle and poetic of practitioners” and her work as “strangely  
arresting and almost always profoundly moving”. She is a Professor of  
Fine Arts (Photography) at Massey University Wellington and was  
awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to photography  
in 2003.


For more information, please contact Alison Bartley, TEL: 04 8024622

High-resolution print quality images are available on request. Low- 
resolution images attached include:
Spoolhenge, South Pole Antarctica, 2009 (billboard installation and  
the photograph itself)
Aurina #4

PUBLIC TALK: ANNE NOBLE WILL GIVE A PUBLIC FLOOR TALK ABOUT HER WORK
at 2pm, on Saturday 28 November 2009
at Bartley + Company Art, 56A Ghuznee Street, Wellington