British artist Tim Noble’s solo exhibition Happy Land presents a series of white relief panels with morbid, provocative imagery. Tapping into the absurdity and overwhelm entrenched in our contemporary reality, Noble juxtaposes a chaotic array of monstrous creatures with the pristine, monochrome jesmonite, hinting at a dystopian world of distortion, consumption, and exploitation partly fueled by social media, technology, or more broadly, an excess of information. Ironically—or perhaps befittingly—my first reaction to the reliefs was: Oh, this looks like the Reddit meme “Landlords will paint over anything”—door knobs, outlets, and, most iconically, cockroaches.
Noble’s body of work on view is rife with motifs of copulation, reproduction, dismemberment, and bodily violence, reminiscent of a Boschian aesthetic. These figures are uncanny and difficult to confront, but not without an irreverent sense of humor. In this interview, the artist discusses the sources of inspiration behind these figurations, as well as his reckoning with media and technological falsities.
Xuezhu Jenny Wang: First of all, congratulations on your new show Happy Land—it’s truly a beautiful body of work. The first thing that struck me was the juxtaposition, and perhaps parallel, between the visual language from the past and our contemporary reality. Could you elaborate on this tension and interaction?
Tim Noble: I was exhibiting at the British Museum, and during the installation, I had some time to look around the Egyptology section. The sun was hitting a seam of hieroglyphics when I found myself staring at this one tiny hieroglyphic, “Hello what are you?” The carving was so intricate and subtle—as I was reading the shadowy edge, which was of course defining the lit surface, I was struck by the intimacy of such a speck of detail.
As a kid, I kept a flea alive in a jar, and when it was hungry, it actively sprang about looking for a host to feed off. I fed it on my arm each day for a month, preparing it for a flea circus. Seeing such an animal as tiny as a flea, I realized how tiny details can sustain attention through the requisite concentration and intimacy from the viewer. It dawned on me how the smallness of things allows you to focus and draws you in.
Look at the Elgin marbles—the fragmented parts, the decay, you know … You start to fill in the gaps and interpret things: the repetition of the frieze, the complete absence of color leaving stains and traces. I took all that away with me and developed these ideas further in my work. The whiteness of my panels, the minute details catching the viewer's gaze.
XJW: How did you become interested in themes of “absurdity, lewdness, and dysmorphia,” and how do today’s technologies, such as social media, play into these themes? Are there any events, trends, or phenomena in particular that you are looking at, critiquing, or referring to?
TN: My father was also an artist, and I grew up in and out of his studio; I distinctly remember one of his large clay relief pieces, entitled The Marriage, depicting a naked conjoined bride and groom. The piece is filled with dark erotic depictions. As an artwork, it was much revered in our family to almost mythical proportions. Years later, it clearly had a profound effect on me, so I decided to explore my youthful rememberings of the work by pouring out all the stuff I had harbored in my head from my childhood—imagery of nasty wasps, overly loved teddy bears, the ruthless survival of nature, and my father's studio.
Once my mind was drained, I had to refill it. I took to scouring through books, then phone, the internet, and social media. Porn was a useful reference for contorted poses and odd muscle tones. I had my phone in one hand and would sculpt with the other. Really, I saw anything that was coming at me as inspiration. Specifically, what stood out in the algorithm of social media, porn, and trashy news articles, were these extreme body modifications: bum, breast, and hip implants, oversized lip filler, body dysmorphia, and fears of aging. I just spliced it all together, sculpted it, and left it open to interpretation.
XJW: When mounted on the white gallery wall, the monochrome reliefs invite sustained attention and observation. I’m curious if this “slow looking” is intentional.
TN: For artists, color and texture are huge. My work goes back to the absence of color—what if color was denied? How would the viewer engage? At first glance, my reliefs appear quite subtle, almost understated, and minimalistic. So you move in closer, and you enter the work in your own time and get to engage in all the intricate details in your own fashion.
I care less about a rigid reading of the characters and more about what you walk away with. “Slow looking” is a product of my want to highlight the details and draw people closer to experience an embodiment with the work.
XJW: The press release mentions this idea of “white marble worship,” Wincklemann’s race-motivated historiography, and the irony behind it, which immediately reminded me of the recent Chroma show at the Met. Can you share more about how your imagery relates to this false idealism or worship?
TN: The Greeks carved idealistic sculptures in marble presenting a false puritanical belief, to worship pure, perfect female bodies void of mistakes. Facetune has that ability, and we can sculpt our own beauty aesthetic and feed it to the masses! That was something that I saw a lot of during my deep dives into social media and the internet. On the flip side, my piece entitled Skin I’m In is a reversal of those feminine standards. The female figure is melting into what can be seen as a pool of her own fat while her scrawny husband continues to pour food down her mouth. This is to say that idealizing a body made up of Photoshop, Facetune, or whatever editing platform is the same as worshiping something that simply does not exist. It affects women as well as men and young boys, who see those fake images online and begin to set their own standards based on these fake images.
A friend of ours was diagnosed with anorexia. She used to talk about being hyperactive and doing star jumps all the time. In my piece entitled Horsey, I sculpted an emaciated woman riding a horse with a phallic head. I wanted to take the perceived image of an emaciated body and turn it on its head to add an air of comic relief to the absurdity of what people do to fit into these impossible beauty standards. It's a lot about control for the individual, a form of escapism that I felt to confront head-on showed the flip side of a so-called idealistic woman. Really, how it came together was fairly intuitive.
I made my reliefs white, with an absence of color, as to paint them left little to the imagination. It felt more challenging to leave them bare. Presenting a new body of work that uses a less obvious form of transient thinking was alluring to me.
My wife recently made photographic portraits of her friends with all their flesh and realism. Her images present the female body in the most sublime and seemingly ordinary rooms, but in quite suffocating interiors that go against the usual portrayal of women being hyper-sexualized with perfect bodies. On the contrary, there is one woman she captured—voluptuous, naked—whose flesh almost melted into a pink leather armchair that stuck out around the perimeter of her body. To add a finishing touch, she is holding a bottle of Irn-Bru. In my eyes, this is Aphrodite at the watering hole.
XJW: How do you brainstorm and decide which motifs go into the reliefs?
TN: I started modeling with clay a headless figure with the bodily skin being peeled off, headless as I couldn’t at the time model a face or hair. I live on the English Channel, and I swim in the cold sea without a wet suit. I have a wet suit, but it wasn’t for me; it is like shedding wet skin when you pull it off—like the skin on my figure was being peeled off with fishing hooks. It's the sort of play that the eyes absorb while the mind morphs it all together as something new. So, the motifs are actually a form of my subconscious as a montage. Each panel has its own process, but they all begin with sculpting and playing around with the ideas, limitations, and possibilities that the clay and my mind allow for. One thing triggers another until there is a flow.
For some artists, it is a purposeful pursuit. They have their motif, and they are dead set on getting their specific idea across. I allow myself more freedom and flexibility in my process to offer the work the opportunity to reveal the motif to me, rather than creating from a definitive mindset.
XJW: When did you make your first relief panel? COVID-19 happened, and a lot has changed since. Have these relief works changed over the past three years?
TN: I made my first relief panel in 2016. At the time, I was concentrating more on personal experience, but more recently, social media took over.
During COVID, my wife and I had two young boys. The second child she breastfed, which may explain images such as breasts, fallopian tubes, and fetuses. I have no idea where the penis trees came from. They just grew from the recesses of the mind.
We are still human. We eat, we shit, we fuck, we die, but what have we learned? Who even knows how oxygen is made? The more we worship AI Gods, the more we will see people turning their insides out, like my teddy bear piece with his guts falling out, pouring out truths they are hungry for, like human filth and vulnerability. How many of us have suicidal thoughts every day? Who will care when the last existing polar bear wanders around, starving on a sliver of ice? The thought terrifies me, but for most of us, it seems too abstract to comprehend. Technology-feeding consumerism is immensely addictive and distracting.
More and more is happening. My children’s children will be able to grow coral from their bubble bedrooms, have AI that you can smell, and be able to surf across clouds on hoverboards to bathe in pools of mud with mammoths walking around while robots and drones are fighting the shit out of each other, and people are fine dining in ethical cannibal restaurants. This is how I think about this work: amalgamations and abstractions of my fears for society and for my children. Raising children today is drastically and alarmingly different from raising children before the age of AI and ever-pervasive technology.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tim Noble: Happy Land is on view at Palo Gallery, 30 Bond Street, New York, until December 21, 2024.
