Alastair Noble

Alastair Noble was born in Liverpool in 1954. He studied at Hull College of Art (1972-75) then moved to the United States in 1975, where he took an MFA degree at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey (1875-77). On graduating he moved to New York where he has since lived, although he currently divides his time between that city and Cornell University at Ithaca, where he is a visiting professor.

Noble is an object maker and installation artist. Poetry has inspired much of his work. Early sculptures were based in architecture and influenced by ancient archaeological sites, notably the standing stones found in Britain at Stonehenge and Avebury as well as further afield in Europe. These took the form of illuminated structures. Recently, he has transformed literary texts and poetry into sculptural or environmental constructions, the text itself often becoming a structural element of the piece. Blake Illuminated (2000) has the appearance of an open book with the impression of verses on each page. However, a cut-out slot represents each word. In this sculpture the verses correspond to the first two poems of William Blake's Songs of Experience. Produced on a large scale, the sunlight passing through the sculpture would provide an illuminated image of the blank spaces on the ground where words might otherwise fall.

A further example of Noble's text manipulations occurred in New York in 2000 in an installation consisting of six glass panels through which he transformed six double folios of A Throw of Dice, the legendary poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, into floating images of blocked-out text, which cast multiple shadows on to the gallery wall. In 2001 at the Lattuada Gallery, Milan, he exhibited a new series of sand-blasted glass panels carrying the text of the poem Brooklyn Bridge, written by the Russian Constructivist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1925.