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Over Labor Day weekend, Alastair Noble, assistant professor of art, didn’t just relax and fly a kite. Instead, he went to work on two brilliant kite-like sculptures for the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey.
Mari D’Alessandro, exhibitions manager at the newly renovated art facility, invited Noble to develop a project for the sculpture garden to correspond with the season’s opening exhibition Travelers Between Cultures: Contemporary Chinese Art.
Noble quickly enlisted Tyler Martikainen-Watcke’08 (Reading, Pa) to help with the preparation and installation.
“I worked mostly cutting and assembling the framework to his specifications,” Martikainen-Watcke says. “Fortunately, there was a good deal of flexibility in the project, which allowed for my own creativity as well. Hopefully, the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey will have an outdoor installation it can be proud of for some time.”
Noble proposed creating structures that were the result of a summer research project titled “Wittgenstein’s Flights.” A collaborative venture between Noble and Michael Howard, senior lecturer on the history of art and design at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, it will evolve over the next three years. Their research thus far has produced a series of installations in different locations in the United States and Europe based on the research of Austrian philosopher, engineer, and architect Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein, who studied aeronautics at the University of Manchester in England from 1908 to 1911, completed research on the design and construction of kites at the Kite Flying Upper Atmosphere Station near Glossop, England. His kite designs were influenced by those built by American Samuel F. Cody, who designed man-lifting war kites for the British military at the beginning of the 20th century.
“Our investigations and sculptural installations demonstrate the twists of language and structure as they relate to Wittgenstein’s research, which could be interpreted as poetic models of the mind,” Noble says. “The final outcome of this series of sculptural works will be an artists’ book.”
According to Noble, the work he has done for the center corresponds to a sculpture he recently completed for the City Art Gallery in Varna, Bulgaria for the Varna Festival of Visual Arts as well as another installation in the Some Serious Business exhibition at the South Side Center in Easton.
“The work is a large winged-like structure that is very similar to the one I produced in Bulgaria except, in this case, the wings are inverted toward the ground, and this one is covered in Tyvak, a synthetic paper that will hold up to the weather,” he explains. “The one in the museum is covered in Japanese paper. The work in the South Side Center is an installation in a room that is based on a small version of this kite-like form. It is suspended in the middle of the room with spotlight to produce a dramatic single dark shadow on the floor of the room.”
Noble was pleased to share the experience with Martikainen-Watcke. The A.B. engineering major became interested in art through his father, Thomas Watcke, who teaches sculpture and photography at Albright College.
“Working with Tyler was a wonderful experience for me and, I hope, for him,” Noble says. “We worked collaboratively. He is very bright and adaptable and is able to work independently. He knew exactly how to handle the tools and quickly learned the techniques I was using for the project, which was built on-site.”
“I’ve been around [my father’s] interests and artwork my whole life,” Martikainen-Watcke adds. “When I got my first elective at college, I decided to take Professor Noble’s sculpture class and enjoyed it very much. During this project, it was good getting to know him outside the typical classroom situation. It was also interesting learning about his interests and inspirations for his works; we talked a great deal about his literary and philosophical inspiration for the pieces we installed.”
Last year, Noble installed Zang Tumb Tumb II during his residency at the University of Arizona. Civil engineering major Jessica Haase ’07 (Glenn Rock, Pa.) worked with him as an EXCEL Scholar to prepare the minimalist sculptures made of plastic, Japanese paper, and lights at the Williams Visual Arts Building before the installation was shipped to Arizona.
Noble also led students in his Concepts in Sculpture course last fall in constructing a large-scale collaborative book sculpture in front of Skillman Library. The sculpture consisted of nearly 1,000 stacked books donated by Quadrant Book Mart in downtown Easton.
Last spring, he constructed a sculpture in the form of the constellation Crux, the Southern Cross for an architectural community in Chile called Open City. Noble was the first artist to be invited to stay on site at Open City and collaborated with its architecture students and faculty on creating a full-size bamboo prototype.
Noble’s art has been exhibited nationally and internationally for more than 25 years, including at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy. His works are part of many private, corporate, and public collections. He is the organizer of several symposia and exhibitions on public art and poetry, contributes regularly as a reviewer for Sculpture magazine, and has published other articles, including a piece in Journal of Architecture.
Noble earned his M.F.A. from Rutgers University and B.A. from Hull College of Art, England.