Banners of Persuasion

From huge drawings of his small-town dystopia to a supersized tapestry, Paul Noble is one artist making it big

NOBLE PURSUITS

Above, a drawing from Paul NobIe´s visionary Nobsun Newtown series was the Inspiration for his Villa Joe tapestry. showing In the ‘Demons, Yarns and Tales’ exhibition in London.

Arcade game music— the sounds of a seaside pier compressed into a repetitive jingle-jangle, bleeps, squeaks and farting noises — fills Paul Noble’s studio. If we closed our eyes and it weren’t for the rain insistently pattering on the roof, we might be walking around the amusements in Whitley Bay, the artist’s home town on the north-east coast of England, ’being an introverted teenager listening to Joy Division’, as be remembers it, ‘where there’s nothing better than sitting with your mate, looking at the sea’. Actually, we’re in Hackney Wick, in London’s East End, at the top of a leaky Victorian warehouse development and Noble is sitting cross-legged on the floor, pixie-like in front of hi stereo, nodding his curly hair from side to side in time with the tinny tune. Much like his work, the vibc is part-Neverland, part-Bedlam.

Since the late 1990s Noble, represented by East London galley Maureen Palcy, has been committed to the completion of a minutely detailed series of large-scale drawings that document the fantastical town of Nobson Newtown. Though it wasn’t finished in time for his 2007 show at New York’s Gagosian Gallery, he hopes it will be ironed out sometime soon. Self-portraiture through town planning is how he once described it. Over the din, Noble explains that the music now playing is the soundtrack to a sideline project: Lauis’ Folly, a computer game of an Oedipal struggle played out between a father, son and one-eyed dog over a sandcastle on the beach.

Realised using the divine perspective of architectural drawing. his world is seen from above, and buildings spell out words in what he calls Nobfont (place names or more highbrow stuff like quotes from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land). As that might suggest, while the technical style promises authority and order, what the artist gives us is a dystopian vision of small-town life and artistic endeavour run amok. ill-designed job centres, hospitals and broken-down suburbanite dwellings make up its architecture, unpopulated except for marauding, sexually incontinent turds: a landscape that is literally full of shit. The schoolboy humour is purposeful. Don’t get too comfortable or make assumptions, the drawings warn. Nothing is forever. Nothing is safe.

Indeed, Noble’s not looking too safe himself right now. Behind him, a system of wires and leads runs from the stereo equipment across the floor towards several buckets catching rainwater dripping from the rafters. A puddle has formed and is snaking across the floor. He leaps up. does a quick mop and takes his seat — a plastic tree-stump stool that would not be out of place within Nobsen’s distinctly English décor- On the work table in front of him, his latest project — a huge tapestry made by hand (though not Noble’s) from one of his drawings. Villa Joe, Front View (2006) —is spread out in heavily embroidered folds. Invited by Suzanne and Christopher Sharp, founders of The Rug Company. to participate in their London exhibition ‘Demons, Yarns and Tales’, which brings together 15 top-of-their- game artists to design tapestries, Noble explains why this particular image was the obvious prototype for such a show.

The 3m x 5m drawing depicts a barren terrain full of Henry Moore-esque sculptures, eroding down the page into ever smaller faccal-looking rocks, which finally reduce to stabbing pencil marks, amid which sits a glasshouse-cum-display cabinet full of lamps, vases and teapots: Villa Joe. Though there is, evidently; something archly ironic in the notion of a future museum dedicated to household knick-knacks rather than the monumental kind of art that lies discarded beyond its walls, this is a tribute of sorts to the artist’s friend, Joseph Holtzman, the interiors fanatic behind the now-defunct iconoclastic design magazine Nest, The kind of bloke, one assumes, who’d appreciate a good tapestry. ‘Joe’s an amazing guy,’ Noble says fervidly, rushing off to dig out some copies of Nest. He actually had urine mixed with varnish for the cover of this special toilet issue ”Piss Elegance”.

On the one hand, this meeting of minds makes perfect sense — a shared appreciation of ornament, approached with tongues firmly planted in cheeks- Joe was even the driving force behind an edition of wallpaper made by the artist. However, Noble’s experience of our built environment, from which his ideas about society and temporality have largely evolved, sounds different to that of the usual design enthusiast.

‘When I first moved to London, 1 squatted a lot,’ he says. ‘You don’t have a lot of stuff That teaches you to have a certain attitude towards property but it also makes you aware of how fragile places are. The houses you move into are often ones that are going to be knocked down’

It was in the early 1990s, when Noble was campaigning against the construction of the M11 link road through Leytonstone, that the concept of Nobson began percolating. You can see how the trappings of suburban homemaking that recur in his drawings a trellis or ornamental ironwork fencing, perhaps — might be revealed as feeble barriers to urban expansion when you’re facing up to a six-lane motorway.

But lowbrow decoration is hardly the focus of Noble’s satiric gaze. When it comes to misconceived social improvement, it’s the overblown presumptions of artists that be has recently targeted, inspired by a drawing from the Nobson series, Paul’s Palace (1996). In this, Noble has chosen a far from practical location for his pad: it sits between cliffs made from Henry Moore—esque boulders, on the shores of a Georgia O’Keeffe-inspired sea, ready to be washed away.

In the latest work. Moore in particular - modernism’s go-to guy for public sculpture; known for his curving, archertypal forms referencing motherhood and the nuclear family - has been inverted. His monuments have become prototypes for a domesticated series of ceramics set on hand-carved wooden bases.

Such small-scale traditional craft is alien to modernism, a movement fixated on big plans for the Future at the expense of immediate reality. Failed housing schemes or those laid off from the Ford production line would be two examples of its pitfalls that surface in Nobson, Noble believes in confronting reality rather than building utopian dreams — hence his embrace of what is bodily and libidinous; shit and sex. in a 6cm-high drawing of every sculpture Moore ever made, Monument, Monument (2007), Noble amasses his globular forms in a spaghetti-like mess of lines, where shapes shift as if they were pulsing cells in a rubble mountain. Here, high art’s flighty ambitions are rendered tantalisingly corporeal.

Noble has expanded Nobson into a 3D realm, creating rugs and beaded curtains alongside tapestry and ceramics, But he is wary of how further generations might interpret the art of yesterday, and one of the reasons pencil and paper has suited his purpose so well is that, unlike traditional sculpture, it is such a fragile, unassuming medium, ‘The discarded Henry Moore sculptures in the drawings are about how things built with a monumental ambition lose their context with time and become irrelevant,’ he says. ‘Paul’s Palace’ wasn’t about building on sand, but the point where the sea meets the land and the motion of the waves wears down stone: it’s change through erosion; the inevitability of everything coming to this fine point’ — like the sharpened tip of a pencil ready to strike.

* www.maureenpaley.com

Nobles tapestry is just one of 14 showing as pan of ‘Demons, Yarns and Tales’, the first exhibition of the new venture, 'Banners of Persuasion', from Suzanne and Christopher Sharp, the couple behind The Rug Company. ‘The density of the knot in a rug makes It difficult to translate detail, so working with artists is tricky,’ Christopher explains, "Everything can be a bit blocky and Rothkoesque," Motivated by a love for the lost medieval tradition of tapestry as status symbol, and by the drive to work more closely with artists, Sharp found producers north of Shanghai who were willing to devote themselves entirely to the project, It’s taken three and a half years — Noble’s piece alone took one year — but the scale and detail is immense and varied. From Julie Verhoeven’s whimsical fairy tale to the social comment of Gavin Turk’s world map, fashioned from crisp packets and drink cans, each rug breathes contemporary life into the medieval craft

'Demons, Yarns and Tales', 10-22 November. The Dairy, 7 Wakefield Street London WC1.

www.bannersofpersuasaon.com