Internationally renowned New Zealand artist, Anne Noble, has developed a number of projects in recent years concerned with bees, global species loss and the revitalization of human relationships to complex living systems. Her work with bees draws on her experience as a beekeeper. Noble sees the bees as a species indicator – both as a living system under stress, a reminder of our part in the global environmental crises we face and also a warning, as she says…’ maybe what is happening to the bees we are also doing to ourselves’.
No Vertical Song comprises a series of portraits of dead bees, installed as if populating an imaginary museum of the future from a time when the bee no longer exists. The portraits were made using a scanning electron microscope, an image making process that employs the element gold to stimulate the tracing of a surface by an electron beam. As alchemic as silver based photography, these processes produce images that are hauntingly beautiful pointers to a silent future scenario. Included in the exhibition are two 3D prints created from the photographs — ghost like points of reference for a memory from the future.
No Vertical Song will be presented at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy, along side the video installation Reverie, and extensive public programs at St Mark’s church, Fitzroy, as part of the ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2017 festival.
Reverie is on display at St Mark’s Church.
