Even as you read this, Paul Noble will probably be sitting cross-legged in front of a giant white egg. There will be no sound in his studio except the squawk of his radio, the scratch of his pencil and the creak of stiff joints — and these will be becoming even stiffer as the day goes on because the egg is an artwork for his forthcoming Whitechapel show and he is covering its surface with densely intricate drawings. Now, as he reaches the base, he has to cramp himself into ever more tortuous knots.
But any physical awkwardness seems as nothing compared with the unease that Noble feels about discussing his work. “The piece is a sort of riff or improvisation — but not an illustration — of a text,” he explains, pulling out a dog-eared volume that lies broken-spined beside him. It is Animal Liberation, a seminal work by Peter Singer. And Noble has offered his own idiosyncratic interpretation of its arguments in the series of drawings in cartoon-strip style. Each is a windowpane on to a blackly comic world of suffering creatures: debeaked chickens and blind dogs, junkie monkeys and vivisected bears.
“I was thinking about species-ism, about our human ability to deny our animal aspect,” he ventures. But then, like all subsequent explanations, this one, as soon as it warms up, starts to run very rapidly away from the immediate point, sliding across subjects, taking ever wider bends as he expands possibilities and explores permutations before veering off on tangents and often losing all track. His conversation overspills across a range of references as heterogeneous as the objects that strew the spaces of his East London studio, and these include anything from his grandfather’s pipe collection to a toy gibbon. He discusses anything from the world view of the 17th-century radical Winstanley to the pioneering radio station Resonance FM, from environmentalism to the teachings of St Paul. “I’m an artist, not a rhetorician,” he says, “and half the fun of being an artist is that you don’t have to make much sense”.
This is in large part the pleasure of his work. Noble creates an imaginative realm that intrigues. In the epic and still ongoing project for which he is most famous — the creation of a city which he calls Nobson Newtown — he maps out a coherent vision of an imaginary place in the manner of Thomas More planning out his Utopia, for instance, or Swift as he depicts his satirical islands, or Dante as he details the concentric layout of his Paradiso.
The best known visual equivalent of these writers is probably Hieronymous Bosch, whose extraordinary realism led him to invent a whole new world of meaningful signs so much the more effective because of their tendency to deform reality. His paintings were not symbols in the static medieval sense, but explosions of meaning, phantasmagorias designed to lay bare the essence of reality through symbols that, though they had no determinable significance were nonetheless rich in suggestion for viewers.
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Noble does not claim Bosch as an influence — the last art show that moved him, he says, was by Carl Andre. Perhaps his work can be considered as akin to some Boschian realm but updated to postmodern sensibility: an age of sliding meanings and play-of-surface references. “Before I started Nobson, I was doing work trying to express an idea and doubting the veracity of that idea and the ways of expressing it,” Noble explains: Nobson was a development of this.
The idea for Noble’s Nobson project was first seeded when he invented a personalised font — he called it Nobson, a play on his name, though he doesn’t like too much being read into the title. “My mother wasn’t very good at names either.” But when he got the first print out of his font, he made “the quick and obvious leap to psychogeography, to the idea that there could be a spatial place for letters”.
And so eight years ago he began his monumental project Nobson. First he made a list of buildings — hospital, brickworks, slums, resort area, public lavatories — each deriving its shape from the letters that made up its name. These he began to illuminate with decorative forms, as gradually (a single work can take more than a year to complete) he built up a series of huge, assiduously draughted and meticulously detailed, wall-size drawings — often incorporating quotations from anything from Gerard Winstanley’s letters to Oliver Cromwell to lines from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat — that offer aerial perspectives over an imaginary, empty metropolis resembling some Soviet housing bloc crossed, perhaps, with a Gothic cathedral. “Town planning as self-portraiture” is how Noble explains the total lack of inhabitants. The artist, it seems, is the only citizen.
The overall effect is astonishing — like some dystopian parody of today’s town planning. But it is in the minute detail that the fascination lies. Look at the Nobspital for instance, its wings and floors constructed from the letters that spell out its name. At a glance it appears like any modern day hospital facility. But peer into the O wing and it gets disconcerting. Hacksaw and wirecutters lie on the operating table.
Noble has published a little guidebook to his city, but it can’t be taken at face value. It parodies the very style of publication that it presents. The visitor is on uncertain territory as gradually, moving deeper into Noble’s imaginative realm, he finds discussions of such issues as civil planning, social policies and historical perspectives all raised — though never clearly defined. An intricate play of references weaves an imaginative picture that alerts and excites.
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But Noble’s work is emphatically not about fantasy. “It’s not whimsical,” he insists. “I’m not Richard Dadd in a loony-bin. Fantasy is a sort of hiding place.” Noble’s work is rather rooted in some modern reality. “Think of Milton,” he suggests. “He was a brilliant scholar and a sharp polemicist and an ardent believer in Cromwell’s Commonwealth. It was only with the failure of what had happened in the real world that he went back to writing and Paradise Lost. His epic was a cultural expression not just of loss but of what hadn’t been achieved. And I’m not saying that I’m like Milton but what fuelled Milton’s fantasy was an incredibly intense and real relationship with the real world, it was the very opposite of fantasy and the opposite of disillusion because if you are disillusioned you don’t bother to communicate anything.”
It would be wrong to see Noble’s creation as simply dystopic. Born in 1963 and brought up in Whitley Bay, he moved to London shortly after his BA at Humberside College of Higher Education. “I came down in a van and moved into a squat. And when you live in a squat you realise how fragile buildings are. Everywhere I’ve lived in London has been destroyed. But the thing about squatting is that when you can find an unclaimed space and make it your home, then everywhere can be your home, you can be lord of everywhere. It’s actually very liberating.”
Nobson has no centre — just a rubble-filled mass. “But having no centre,” Noble explains, “is a way of looking at how, when I started out, Thatcherism was at its peak and I had a sense of having a peripheral experience of things. But then our vision of life is often peripheral.”
So instead of emphasising some central message or point, he tries to put as much into Nobson as possible, to leave room for as many possible meanings and interpretations. “No style, only technique. No accidents, only mistakes” are the twin mottos of Nobson cited in the guidebook. “I’m not a propagandist,” Noble says. “It doesn’t have to make sense. I’m concerned with all sorts of stuff and it all slips through your fingers. It’s like sand,” he says, pointing out the empty sandy spaces of one of the new pictures that will form the centre of his forthcoming Whitechapel show. “Sand has so many resonances: time is measured by sand, sand is also about slippage, Christ said you are a fool to build your foundations upon sand, but you can also see a universe in a grain of sand.”
He stops suddenly. “Maybe I’ve talked too much and I’ve used all my words up.” As I leave him he is re-immersing himself in his imaginative visual world.
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Nobson Newtown is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London E1, from September 10 (020-7522 7888)