Photographer Anne Noble's latest book has pictures of bees and essays about them. Photo / Laurel Stowell
Photographer Anne Noble's latest book has pictures of bees and essays about them. Photo / Laurel Stowell
Former Whanganui artist and photographer Anne Noble has launched her latest book in her home town.
The book is called Conversātiō - in the company of bees. It's both a book about art and a book about bees and was launched to about 50 people at Lesley Stead's Lockett Gallery on Sunday, October 17.
Noble keeps bees at her Wellington home and she said the book was about her journey with them.
"I love bees. They've been a very happy preoccupation for many years."
Noble was brought up in Whanganui, in a house on the banks of the Whanganui River. She's been a Tylee Cottage artist in residence here twice.
Her latest residency finished in January, and her project was "the incredible history" of the Tongariro Power Development that diverts water from the river's headwaters.
Other projects have included Antarctica and her daughter Ruby's mouth. She is a Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts at Massey University and was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2003.
Working at nearby Bushy Park Tarapuruhi recently, she dropped into Paige's Book Gallery, introduced herself and asked Stead whether she would stock the new book. Stead said she would love to hold an event for it.
That event became the book's launch because Massey University Press publisher Nicola Legat was caught in Auckland by the Covid-19 lockdown and other launches were cancelled.
It was Dr Zara Stanhope, a curator at New Plymouth's Govett Brewster Art Gallery, who suggested making a book about Noble's journey with bees and all the people who had been part of it.
Conversātiō - in the company of bees is a lavish production with a cloth cover. Photo / Laurel Stowell
The book contained photographs taken in various ways, Stanhope said - tintypes, and images taken with an electron microscope and by camera obscura.
It asks the question "What is a bee? What's the life of a bee and how do we understand it?"
It includes essays by a Queensland brain scientist and by a person who teaches about bees in schools.
With Stanhope and Noble at the launch was the book's award-winning designer Anna Brown. She said she had to fight for the "bells and whistles" that went into its production - including a cloth cover that opens out to show the flight path of two insects.
The book had been a collective project, Noble said. Its audience would be people interested in art, but also people interested in the environment and in complex living systems.
