The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

117 ARTISTS Dead Bee Portrait #14 2015–16 (from Museum: For a time when the bee no longer exists ) Pigment on paper / 91.5 x 115cm / Courtesy: The artist and Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland Born 1954, Whanganui, Aotearoa New Zealand Lives and works in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand As one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most acclaimed contemporary photographers, Anne Noble has engaged with communities of many types, from the silent nuns of Tyburn Convent, London, to elderly intellectually disabled people, in photo essays that touch on both material and immaterial worlds. 1 Based in observation and in research, her images of places and people offer a meditation on life. Noble’s project in APT9 continues her interest in photography’s integration into other forms of knowledge, particularly the sciences. She conceived the work as an engagement with the bee — historically and symbolically revered in myth, religion and literature — as well as a call to action for a species whose essential, global existence is threatened by pests, disease and chemicals. Comprising a working hive of European honey bees, still images and video, the project celebrates the bee and its significance. Having previously engaged with scientists (notably in her Antarctic projects) and explored how photography intersects with other disciplines, for this project, Noble collaborated with scientists from the Queensland Brain Institute to design the hive and its transparent passageway, which allows the bees to navigate from the outside world to their hive inside the Gallery. The hive is, in Noble’s terms, ‘a living photograph’, contained within her custom-built Conversatio: A cabinet of wonder 2018. Opened several times a day for public observation of the growing bee community, the hive acts as a catalyst for social dialogue. Noble’s methods are characterised by a personal, ‘felt’ connection, so much so that her work is often described in terms of the senses — as if she is ‘touching’ or ‘listening to’ her subject matter. 2 Her fascination with bees blossomed when keeping her own hives and led to a project in Abbaye de Noirlac, France, where she created the first ‘Cabinet of Curiosity’ with local physics teacher and apiarist Jean-Pierre Martin in 2015–16. In addition to Conversatio: A cabinet of wonder 2018, the APT9 project comprises Museum: For a time when the bee no longer exists , which includes ‘Dead bee portraits’ 2015–16 (images of dead bees, scanned under an electron microscope, and transformed into photographs) and a video work, Reverie 2016, which evokes a dreamy sensation induced by the sound and smell of the hive. Noble sees these works as the stimulus for new conversations, asking questions that ‘can result in differently nuanced understandings of our material environment that re-engage us with complex notions of culture and soul critical to our sense of belonging in the world’. 3 In this most complex of Noble’s projects to date, she extends photography as a subject for reflection. In alluding to the past and present, such works ask questions about death and memory that also pertain to the critical theory of photography. These qualities resonate in the photograms from the series ‘UMBRA’ 2015–17. Individually entitled Bruissement (rustling or murmuring), 4 the prints are produced by exposing photographic paper to clusters of dead bee wings held in the artist’s hands. Enlarged several thousand times until seemingly abstract, the images hang hauntingly still and silent alongside the traffic of the live bees. 5 Since photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot invented the first photograms in 1830, artists have created images by placing objects on top of photosensitive paper. Yet Noble’s take on Talbot’s ‘photogenic drawing’ is more than an entomological study of demise. Together, her images comprise a visual ode to a creature that has been considered a model for human society since Roman times. Although humankind has compromised this species of pollinators with chemicals and pesticides in the interests of agriculture, bees are, more than ever, the subject of research that is advancing fields such as flight, navigation and communication. Anne Noble’s work engages with this complexity and our multifaceted relationship with the natural world. Zara Stanhope Endnotes 1 The series ‘In the presence of angels – photographs of the contemplative life’ 1988 and ‘Hidden lives: The work of care’ 1994, respectively. 2 See Justin Paton (ed.), Anne Noble: States of Grace , Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Victoria University Press, Dunedin and Wellington, 2001. 3 Anne Noble, in ‘Seeing risk: Naomi Cass in conversation with Anne Noble’, in No Vertical Song [exhibition catalogue], Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2017, p.40. 4 This is a reference to Roland Barthes’s Le Bruissement de la langue (The Rustle of Language) , suggesting the whispers of meaning beyond words. 5 The wings came from bees from hives in Chicago that had died from pesticide poisoning. Daniel Palmer, ‘Anne Noble: The spirit of the beehive’, in No Vertical Song , p.9. ANNE NOBLE