The artist-duo met in 1986 while studying Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, both receiving their BA with Honors in 1989, and have worked together since. Throughout their over twenty-year career, Noble & Webster have explored the ways people perceive and transform abstract images and imbue them with meaning to create transformative art that echoes the concepts of “perceptual psychology”. Deeply influenced by punk music, their works combine opposites such as high/anti-culture, form/anti-form, male/female, art/garbage or sex/violence. Using waste, scrap metal or wood or taxidermy animals, the sculpture, when a light is shone directly on it, reveals easily recognizable silhouettes. One of their most renowned works, the shadow of Dirty White Trash (1998), composed of six months of the artists’ trash with taxidermy seagulls, shows full-body self-portraits of the artists drinking and smoking; other sculptures, such as Kiss of Death (2003) or Dark Stuff (2008), reveal their decapitated heads on spikes composed entirely of taxidermy creatures and bones. They also create light-sculptures, such as Toxic Schizophrenia (1997) or Forever (2015), that are influenced by pop culture, tattoos and kitsch. Over the past twenty years, they have exhibited extensively internationally including solo and group exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts (2005), Boston; MoMA PS1 (2003), New York; Triumph Gallery (2009), Moscow; Blain|Southern (2012), National Portrait Gallery (2014) and the Royal Academy of Arts (2016), all London. They participated in Distortion (2009) and Glasstress (2013), collateral events of the Venice Biennale. Noble & Webster were awarded the ARKEN Prize (2007) and Honorary Degrees of Doctor of Art from Nottingham Trent University (2009).
