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Fleur Elise Noble. It’s the kind of dreamy name that inspires perfume labels. After an animated phone conversation with Fleur, 24, I decide her signature scent would splash words like ‘ethereal’ and playful’, ‘real and honest’ all over the perfumery floor. Take a peek at her filmic theatre work (www.fleurelisenoble.com) and you’ll see for yourself these characteristics in her puppets, sketches, performances and projections. Last year Fleur was awarded ‘Best in Show’ in Brisbane Festival’s Under the Radar program – a curated fringe-theatre festival that celebrates new work by emerging, mid-career and experimental artists (www.brisbanefestival.com.au/undertheradar). Now, with a busy program of festival shows and a world tour newly on the cards, she thinks she just might be living her greatest achievement at this very moment …

Like her filmic theatre pieces, Fleur doesn’t stand still for long and is constantly creating and playing. Halfway through our interview, as I cotton on to the furious pace she rushes at life and her art making, she gives her infectious laugh and confesses, “I’m literally jumping around right now!”

That’s when I realise I’m methodically (yet nonsensically) winding and unwinding a piece of twine around my thumb and index finger over and over again. Fleur’s the kind of person who channels creativity and energy, even down a phone line.

She currently divides her time between Brisbane and her home in Adelaide, so we can almost claim her as a local artist. Her style is loosely tagged as ‘filmic theatre’ and meshes all of her talents in the one creative pot. She is a visual artist and a performing artist, a filmmaker, animator, projectionist and puppet maker who is enamoured with making transitory art that lifts off the canvas and onto the stage and screen.

Fleur shares that she is in a good creative space right now after working intense 10- to 12-hour days for many years on various pieces including Work in Progress, which is a breathtaking combination of film and animation that unravels into a unique theatre production. It tells a delicate, silent tale (with the odd accordion thrown in) of paper puppets that push their way through paper walls to escape their two-dimensional existence and inhabit an imaginary world.

The gorgeous piece won Fleur the ‘Best in Show’ award at its debut at Metro Arts in Brisbane Festival’s Under the Radar fringe fest in 2008, and has since toured to New Zealand and Adelaide, also winning the South Australian Short Film Awards for Best Animation. It recently caught the eye of Lee Cumberlidge, executive producer of Insite Arts, and a world tour is now on the cards.

“I think my greatest achievement is happening right now,” Fleur explains. “It’s a wonderful time because it’s a kind of celebration of the work. I’ve been able to meet people through it and develop relationships so the work is sparking a creative community for me and that’s what I’ve always dreamt of happening.”

Since finishing high school in 2001 and momentarily sitting on the fence, trying to work out which way to jump – visual arts or performing arts? – Fleur has managed to craft a career that combines the best of both worlds.

“After high school I got a scholarship to go to an art school so I ended up focusing on visual art by default, and I loved that,” she explains of the early days. In 2005 Fleur won a 12-month scholarship to study at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture where she says she pushed the two-dimensional surface to such an extreme with long days and late nights of drawing and painting that she realised she loved it but she could also now let go of it.

“While I was learning and challenging myself I was happy and content, but when it got to a point where it was harder to push things within that two-dimensional medium, I think that is what partially created the frustration. I ended up realising, ‘There’s so much more to explore and I still want to find a way to make performing arts part of my life’.”

Fleur returned to Adelaide and completed her visual-arts degree before moving to Brisbane in 2008 to explore performative work. She enrolled in an internship with Zen Zen Zo and pitched a show to Under the Radar the same year. When the programmers accepted her into the line-up, she hadn’t actually created the show … “Having that festival slot as a real pressure to make a show was the perfect situation for me. In a sense I couldn’t have done it without the support from Zen Zen Zo and Under the Radar.”

Fleur explains what she strives to achieve with her work. “I wanted Work in Progress to bring people into a space where everything was alive and being made, and a space of endless possibilities. So if people
see my films and leave with a sense that anything is possible then I feel like the work has done its job.”

Her advice to other young artists is to find mentors who will push them beyond their boundaries.
“Try to find a space where you’re striving and you’re slightly out of control and you’re learning.
Find a passion for learning and don’t become attached to what you can already do, but work out what you can’t do yet.”

The challenge along the way is to stay true to yourself and your work. It’s a test Fleur can foresee as her work and her profile grows. “My dream was to tour this work and that’s happening, so that’s wonderful. And I guess my main thing is, no matter how big this work becomes and how much support it attracts, to always stay true to it being authentic, because it is something I care about and it’s honest. Maintaining that, I think, will be the greatest challenge … If I could live my life always managing to make real, honest work then that would be my dream come true.”

Interview by Frances Frangenheim