Quartet for Worm with Paul Noble

During his residency in the Drawing Office at Sir John Soane's Museum in 2024, Paul Noble hoped to find a new rule that would get the measure of both himself and Sir John Soane. At the heart of all the works on display in this exhibition are scale and measurement which Noble, as an artist, architect and town planner, uses as a way of understanding the world and as a generative force in itself.

Central to this display is the Lesbian Rule. Originating from a malleable type of lead on the island of Lesbos, the Lesbian Rule is a curved rule that lends itself to measuring complicated forms such as the architecture left behind by worms tunnelling through the earth.

This exhibition will be accompanied by the first performance of Noble's Quartet for Worm in our Soane Late event on 25 April 2025.

Lesbian Rule,
Can you measure wormish infinity?
Measure the white, free chasm, infinity,
the only reality, infinity the abyss, the bottomless
pit to which the mind falls?
Lesbian Rule, are you he who will never be caught,
never delivered, who crawls between the thwarts,
towards the new day that promises to be glorious.
Lesbian Rule: Do you know, the mind disdains
what it can’t control,
Which will in turn destroy it –
The mind cannot conceive being wholly physical,
not metaphorical.
Lesbian Rule, what is your word?
INFINITY,
meaning that which cannot be measured.
Darwin was a Lesbian.
He said: ‘(the worm’s) attention indicates
the presence of a mind – some degree of
intelligence appears’.
I bend my will to fit the world.
I fit in Well. My limbs and my body are my measure.
I am you, the Lesbian Rule.

— Paul Noble / Artist