Don’t we all love a volatile love story. A story where magic is made out of tears.
Internationally acclaimed British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster started creating together, designing sets during the hedonistic 1990s rave scene. They were best known for their Vegas-style illuminations and for their comment on our consumer culture with compositions made from trash.
Blain Southern Gallery in Hanover Square is showing the couple’s first major solo exhibition in London since 2006 – Nihilistic Optimistic. Out of the debris from a working artists studio, abstract sculptures cast shadows which are projected onto the walls of the gallery.
Looking at the sculptures there is no way of telling what shadow it will produce, but there ahead of you appears a perfect vision of a young man, a warrior woman, a seated couple. The debris is mainly indistinguishable, the floor covered in sawdust and shavings, and there is the odd roll of tape, a 3 pin plug, a pencil, paint brushes, chair legs.
But mainly random bits of wood, nailed together in a jumble, with no obvious cohesion, connection or harmony between the pieces. The images created are all self portraits and have telling names such as Wild Mood Swings, Self-Imposed Misery, Nasty Pieces of Work.
The gallery blurb uses words such as chaos, disorder, disintegration, destruction, despairing, a telling way to describe this exhibition and perhaps an insight into the state of an unravelling relationship.
I find myself speculating on how the creation of this work may have been the undoing of the artists’ marriage; they are now, apparently, living apart.
As I get the bus home I wonder how probable is it to be able to work at something together so passionately, to produce something so raw, and then have to put on your jim jams and hop into bed together, to find yourselves arguing over the washing up. Does there have to be some escape from your partner in art?
But I hope they do continue together, it’s just getting interesting.
Words & Photos: Nikki Verdon
