Villa Joe

Based on the central work of Paul Noble’s 2010 Laing Art Gallery exhibition, this monumental tapestry recreates Noble’s painstaking pencil draughtsmanship in hand-dyed yarn. It shows the stony landscape surrounding Villa Joe, a ‘personalised holiday villa’ near Noble’s imagined city of Nobson Newtown. The villa itself, a gigantic glass building in the shape of the name Joe, is depicted as a cabinet of curiosities filled with ornaments and stuffed animals. The stony landscape around the building is littered with allusions to Henry Moore, with rock formations echoing Moore’s reclining figures and helmet series. Noble was born in Dilston, a village near Newcastle, and grew up in nearby Whitley Bay, making this a significant acquisition for the Laing Art Gallery.