While concerns about the decline of the honeybee are at the heart of the artist and beekeeper's project, this exhibition 'Nature Study' looks at how we perceive and understand the natural world. Going beyond her own garden and hives, and drawing on the strategies of science and more specifically morphology -- the study of the form and structure of organisms, Anne uses found specimen slides, her own homemade microscope and electronic scanning microscopes to bring us intensely close-up photographs of bee anatomy.

As an eidolon is a spirit image or phantom. the over-scale images of bee wings titled 'Eidolon' suggest something at once essential, ethereal, even angelic. These images operate within the exhibition to steer us beyond a rationalist, scientific approach to knowledge to something broader. With scientists struggling to understand, contain and manage colony collapse and the huge economic ramifications for crop pollination, 'Nature Study' evokes a sense of alternative paradigms embodied in the values of the nature study movement and the more contemporary holistic understanding of human impact in the ecosystem.

The exhibition comprises new photographic prints on paper and a series of unique tintypes, where images from old scientific slides are printed onto metal plates coated with light-sensitive emulsion.

I like the magic of photography and its capacity to align the surface appearances of the world with an interior experience of time, memory, and being that exists beyond the visible. Anne Noble

Anne Noble is Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts (Photography) at Massey University, Wellington and is the recipient of numerous awards including an Arts Foundation Laureate Award and a New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to photography. She has exhibited widely internationally and her work is in collections throughout the world.