Anne Noble
WHITEOUT WHITENOISE

WHITEOUT WHITENOISE is the culmination of Anne Nobles investigation into perception and cognition of the Antarctic landscape. Formulated in response to Herbert Ponting’s declaration that there was nothing to photograph in the wide white space of the polar plateau, Noble’s intimate ambiguous images of light and space speak to the lineage of heroic age imagery. They also offer an aesthetic of fragility, as a closer match to both the frailty of human perception and the fragility of Antarctica itself. Noble has pursued the condition of whiteout and a poetic space of ambiguity where tricks of the light set scale and perspective askew. The images render vast white space in miniature, in obverse relation to the scale of Antarctica itself. The exhibition at Two Rooms Gallery includes images of road works and ice blasting, and an artist’s book WHITE NOISE – comprising lists of the word white drawn from Antarctic literature. White as a noun, (virgin white, pure white), white as an adjective, (white grandeur, white tablecloth) comprise an apparently endless text that points to the encultured human response to Antarctica.

…” The ‘Whiteout’ photographs aim to inspire the search for an image and the struggle to see. They also aim to evoke both the wonder of the ice and the irony that through looking at white (and all the contrasts and subtleties of that colour, tone, and hue) we can examine the act of seeing itself—the processes of creating imaginatively what is not there—and our human capacity for making that absence a presence for which we long” (AN, 2006)