This work is from Noble's Antartica Series. "Noble's substantial body of work spans landscape, documentary and installations incorporating both still and moving images. She often works in series, enabling her to explore the medium and its possibilities in great depth. Since 2001, she has been researching and photographing Antarctica. In a project that has taken her to Antarctic centres all over the world as well as Antarctica itself, she explores the cultural construction of place and how our knowledge of such places is shaped through representation and imagination. Her images challenge the traditional depiction of the Antarctic landscape as heroic, picturesque or sublime and seek to suggest some of the current complexities that that underly the region's beauty. In 2008 she won a prestigious US National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Award to travel and work in Antarctica to complete this project. There were 97 applicants for six awards and she was the only recipient from outside the US. "
- Accessed 10/04/13 from Bartley and Company Art's webiste:
http://www.bartleyandcompanyart.co.nz/artist-series.php?artistID=505

The observer becomes the observed in Anne Noble’s Penguin (Nagoya Aquarium) Japan from her Antarctica series (2003). While the visitors are supposedly there to see the penguins, Noble makes the point that they are recording the view through their tiny mobile phone screens rather than actually watching the expansive underwater vista in front of them, causing the real penguin to become a secondary blur.
- Jennifer Taylor Moore, Curator of Collections. Exhibition label text for 'Observations from the Collection' 18/3/2023 - 30/6/2023