State of cool liberation

By MALCOLM BURGESS

Anne Noble's retrospective, States of Grace, has remarkable stamina, having snaked its way around the country like the Whanganui River of her earlier explorative images.

Now in its third year, the show started in Dunedin at the end of 2001, crossed Cook Strait to Wellington in mid-2002, spent the summer at the Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui, and now graces Auckland in its latest state.

In that time Noble says the show has assumed "a curatorial coherence that's separate from me. It's really independent of me".

River images somehow managing to show Noble's real connection to the Whanganui, collected items from her youth and depictions of the less fortunate are all examples of the paydirt Noble has hit while plumbing her own life.

Images from Noble's Hidden Lives series lovingly mix documentary reportage with genuine care for their subjects, while those from Ruby's Room are playful in love - in the sense only a mother's relationship with her daughter can be.

The photos from two decades of creative development are so varied, they could almost be the work of a host of artists. But on closer examination, something clearly unifying runs through the collection of black and white "reportage", colourful close-ups and collected ephemera.

Perhaps it's a belief that somewhere between the photographer, the subject and the viewer - in that journey, in fact - a poetic honesty can be evoked by focusing not on objectivity, but the things that resonate in the artist's own life.

Although Noble consciously gave up photojournalism to concentrate on a style she found more honest to herself, there are remnants of the former in this collection. This puts her in the company of other well-known contemporaries, the most obvious being Eugene Richards, whose works are more at home as artworks, rather than at the beck and call of a merciless news angle.

Despite a surfeit of descriptions such as "elegiac" and "lyrical", Noble's honest, poetic works speak best for themselves. Perhaps the only words really missing in relation to States of Grace are those connected to Noble's unrealised Hidden Lives project. Noble got so far as writing to the great British novelist and art critic John Berger to seek an essay for inclusion, but the book did not come to fruition.

Meanwhile, in Wellington, Noble gets on with her life and her art. A touring survey of two decades of autobiographical mementos might seem like seeing your life "flash" before your eyes in a slow, drawn-out loop. But Noble says it's been a liberating experience that has allowed her to move on in wholly different directions.

And that direction, since January last year, has been south - first, physically, and then again and again in her work. Her latest artistic obsession is Antarctica, following three weeks spent on the artist programme that regularly exposes writers, painters, journalists and photographers - the permutations are endless - to a landmass most people will never experience, except second-hand through snapshots and movies.

"Most people can only imagine Antarctica," she muses.

"Photographs of it are filtered through tales of adventure, exploration and heroism, but they also contribute to how we construct the idea of a place. Science and colonisation, too, have played a large part in how we think about the continent. It's interesting to try to think about it differently."

With Antarctica, most of what people know is "received knowledge". And so, since her conversion to the ice, her interest has been in "how we come to know and understand a place through photography".

In addition to photographing her own "imagined destination", Noble also went looking for the real place - be it Scott Base, or a Toyota parked outside McMurdo Base, like a true explorer.

With the immediacy of the ice a receding memory, Noble's latest work looks at "how we recreate Antarctica away from Antarctica in museums and discovery centres".

To document this, she has returned to landscapes and is focusing on the New Zealand-Antarctic experience, visiting all manner of Antarctic discovery centres around the country. Next week she is off to Tasmania - Australia's backdoor to the ice - to attend an Antarctic festival.

Noble says artists have a special place on "a continent that is supposedly devoted to science", something she considers to be a narrow band of inquiry. "The role of art is to sit alongside science as a mode of discovery. The New Zealand Antarctic programme recognises that."

And photography, that great merging of art and science, is well equipped to weigh up that issue.

But don't expect white on white. Her work in progress is colourful - more in the vein of the ultra-dayglow of Ruby's Room.

"I'm making rich, colourful photographs - they're so rude and loud," she laughs.

Today, however, she imparts her skills for a living, teaching photo-media and design, among other subjects, at Massey University's new school of fine arts in Wellington.

And Noble is particularly pleased to announce the development of yet another series in which she has a strong interest - the first crop of bachelor of fine arts students will soon graduate, something the usually soft-spoken artist effuses over as a "very exciting" prospect.

Exhibition:

* What: States of Grace by Anne Noble

* Where: New Gallery * When: June 14-August 31