Tim Noble and Sue Webster

Timothy Noble (born 1966) and Susan Webster (born 1967), are British artists who work as a collaborative duo.

They are associated with the post-YBA generation of artists.

Noble and Webster attended fine art foundation courses at Cheltenham Art College (now the University of Gloucestershire) and Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University) respectively.

The two first met in 1986 as Fine Art students at Nottingham Trent University, became good friends through shared interests, particularly their tastes in music.

Their work features in a number of public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

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.

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.

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.

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."

The light sculptures, created in tandem with their shadow investigations, are constructed out of computer sequenced light-bulbs that perpetually flash, sending out messages of, often simultaneous, love and hate.

In 2007, they were awarded the prestigious Arken Prize, and in 2009 they received Honorary Doctorates of Art from Nottingham Trent University, their former college, in acknowledgement of their artistic achievements to date.

The artists are currently represented by BlainSouthern in London.

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, [Tim] Noble and [Sue] 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.'"

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."