Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s giant twisted bronze sculptures, which go on show at Blain Southern this week (Tim Noble and Sue Webster: Sticks with Dicks and Slits, 3 February-25 March), mark a completely new departure for the artist duo. But, as they revealed to your correspondent during a sneaky pre-PV preview, these three-metre-high self-portraits had a ten-year gestation, which began not in their natural habitat of gritty East London but against a rather more idyllic Caribbean backdrop. “We got sent to Coventry, or rather to St Bart’s on a residency, and there was nothing to do,” Noble says. “So I started fiddling around, making self-portraits from bits of wire.”
It was only a couple of years ago, during a draconian clear-out of their Shoreditch studio and home—the black-painted “Dirty House” built for them by David Adjaye in 2002—that Webster came across the small wire models made in that moment of luxurious boredom. “For some reason I decided not to throw them out with everything else, but to keep them,” she says.
This rediscovery also took place at a time when the pair—who had lived and worked together since they both turned up a day late to enroll at art school in Nottingham in 1986—were parting as a couple. So the new sculptures, which posed the considerable challenge of capturing the breezy spontaneity of twisted wire in cast bronze, also usher in a fresh phase in Noble and Webster’s relationship as artistic collaborators. “It feels great to come up with a totally new body of work whilst tackling a new material at the same time,” Webster says. “Sometimes you really have to lose yourself in order to discover something new.”
It is perhaps also significant that Noble and Webster’s second East London property—designed again by Adjaye and currently under construction—has provided much of the raw material for the works. “We are in the middle of this huge building project but for the past few months our main focus has been making maquettes from all the bits of leftover electrical wire that we keep picking up from the building site,” Webster says.