Anne Lysbeth Noble is a New Zealand photographer and Distinguished Professor of Fine Art at Massey University's College of Creative Arts. Her work includes series of photographs examining Antarctica, her own daughter's mouth, and our relationship with nature.
Noble's approach to her work involves "prolonged observation and attentive watching". She is known for working in photographic series. Her first major exhibition, The Wanganui, opened at the Sarjeant Gallery in 1982 and toured to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland, Hamilton and Te Manawa in Palmerston North. Writer Sheridan Keith described these works as "a series of images of immense spirituality, serenity and intensity of feeling". In the presence of angels – photographs of the contemplative life is a series of photographs documenting life inside a London convent. Noble lived with the Benedictine nuns in the silent order for an extended period. In My Father’s Garden is a series of photographs that follow the artist's father's death, while the Hidden Lives series capture the lives of elderly intellectually disabled people and their carers. The series Ruby’s Room features close-up images of the photographer's daughter's mouth. The artist says that many of the best childhood moments go unrecorded, and that many of these "relate to pleasures and play around the mouth, moments of defiance and triumph, like managing to blow a really good bubble with bubble gum... I wanted to magnify the colour, the spontaneity, the life, the fun and play, and all the things that I enjoyed as a mother." In 2010 the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa acquired 30 of the works from the series as a boxed portfolio, describing them as "standing alongside her Antarctic work Anne Noble's major body of photography from the 2000s". In 2001 the Dunedin Public Art Gallery staged a major retrospective of Noble's work, Anne Noble: States of Grace, which toured to City Gallery Wellington and the Auckland Art Gallery. Since 2001, Noble has been researching and visiting the Antarctic, and has produced several series of works on this subject, including Antarctica Iceblink and Antarctica Whiteout. These works are often concerned with how Antarctica has been portrayed in popular perceptions, exploring how we have come to see Antarctica as "a glistening white world where penguins frolic and snowflakes fall". Recently, Noble's work has investigated the honeybee and its place in our world, research instigated by her time on a Fulbright fellowship based at Columbia College in Chicago as their international artist in residence. Her first exhibition on this subject, Nature Study, was held at Bartley+Company in Wellington in 2015. Writing about these new works, art historianPriscilla Pitts noted:
For several years Noble has focused her camera on Antarctica, 'the last great wilderness on earth', intractable despite our efforts to document and understand it, yet fragile and susceptible to our actions elsewhere on the planet. Noble's attention to the plight of bees arises from the same concern for the natural environment and what we are doing to it. In these new works there is a shift from the ostensibly documentary mode of the Antarctic images towards a more overtly poetic exploration of her subject, something that is familiar from much of her earlier work.
