British artist Paul Noble has received widespread international recognition for his monumental eight-year project—the meticulous depiction of a fictional city called Nobson Newtown. Noble is a master draughtsman, whose wall-sized drawings offer aerial perspectives over a fantastical cityscape that echoes the visionary ethos of projects such as the Garden City Movement—source here.
…Nobson Newtown and its environs might owe something to Dickens’s Coketown, to Viz comics, to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and his graphic work for Monty Python […] Nobson, too, is built on words. Many of Noble’s blocky, modernist-looking houses […] are derived from Nobfont, a geometric typographic font also invented by the artist. […]The 3x4m drawing Nobson Central presents acres of ruination that might belong in bombed-out Baghdad or Kabul or an earthquake zone, row upon row of what appear to be modernist slums, concrete dwellings whose walls are breached and pocked, their flat roofs gone.
[…] The configuration of the rows upon rows of buildings actually spells out the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. But why board up the windows of a house whose walls are open? Why put out the neatly tied binbags when everywhere is rubbish strewn? The details are terrific: clods of concrete writhe and dangle like bad sculpture on twisted stanchions, a perky satellite dish points skyward, a trellis hangs on a side wall (perhaps waiting for Eliot’s April lilacs), a pipe pumps muck, uselessly, from shell-hole to midden. Whether all this devastation was wrought by friendly bombs, unfriendly builders or enemy mortars we shall never know—source here.
Nobson is a new town with old customs and beliefs, complete with chemical works, quarry, slums and a palace by the sea. There is also a hospital (Nobspital) and a building called Trev—source here.
The origins of this ‘exercise in self-portraiture via town planning’ lie in the painstaking design of a special font based on the forms of classic modernist architecture. Variously described as ‘3-D Scrabble tiles’ or ‘Lego blocks’, Noble’s pictograms name the buildings that they depict. From the hospital (Nobspital) to the cemetery (Nobsend) via the town centre (Nobson Central) or the Mall, citations from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, Gerard Winstanley’s letters to Oliver Cromwell or T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland are camouflaged within the fields, the trees or the brickwork. Noble’s project embodies a complex infrastructure of civil planning, social policies and historical perspectives—source here.
I owe my discovery of Noble’s work to a recent entry at Cipango. The images above I took from a book entitled Nobson Central, whose 200 pages are entirely given over to close-up details of this single elaborate drawing. The first and last of the present images are scans of the front and back covers of the book, while the remaining images are a selection of sections of details from its pages. These images are Copyright © 2000 Paul Noble, and have been reproduced without permission, only for as long as no-one objects to their presence here.Posted by misteraitch at January 7, 2005 11:18 AM | TrackBack