The two first met in 1986 as Fine Art students at Nottingham Trent University, became good friends through shared interests, particularly their tastes in music.

[10] In 2007, they were awarded the prestigious Arken Prize,[11] and in 2009 they received Honorary Doctorates of Art from Nottingham Trent University, their former college, in acknowledgement of their artistic achievements to date.

[20] The silhouettes are formed by lights shining on mounds of rubbish, which includes broken sunglasses and pin badges for rock bands.

[21][22] Through their shadow sculptures they managed to fuse the abstract and the representational, a pursuit that consumed the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon.

[20] This became even more apparent with their second major shadow sculpture, 'Dirty White Trash (with Gulls)', 1998 (left), which expanded the innovations of 'Miss Understood and Mr Meanor'.

[23] Jeffrey Deitch, the director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, writes: "Dirty White Trash (with Gulls) is a confluence of beauty and filth, form and anti-form.

Using his collection of taxidermy animals, it is an assemblage of forty-six birds, forty mammals, and two stuffed fish, including a whole swan and even the pet crow Noble kept as a child.

For this they presented 'The Undesirables', which comprises a mountain of detritus collected from outside Tim and Sue's house with a shadow image of the artists hovering above.

[25] The appearance of a huge pile of rubbish in one of the largest galleries within the Royal Academy was intentionally radical and shocking, created to challenge viewers' assumptions about art.

"[28] The light sculptures, created in tandem with their shadow investigations, are constructed out of computer sequenced light-bulbs that perpetually flash, sending out messages of, often simultaneous, love and hate.

As with the shadow sculptures, duality lies at its core; the work represents romance and pain, love and hate, friendship and alienation, negative and positive.

[14] The twenty foot long revision of their original 1997 'Forever' is inextricably linked to the artist's earlier trips to Las Vegas, playing with the traditional connotations of the word, as the constantly flashing lights reinforce the idea of 'forever'.

Called 'The New Barbarians' (left), the work is based upon a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, which shows a reconstruction of two early ancestors of the human species.

The 35-foot tall 'Electric Fountain', constructed from steel, neon tubing and 3,390 LED bulbs, was exhibited at Rockefeller Plaza, New York, February 2008.

The fountain can be seen as both a celebration of contemporary culture and an ambiguous comment on the nature of consumer society, embodying themes that are often present in the duo's work.

[1] In 2001, Tim Noble and Sue Webster bought a dilapidated early twentieth-century furniture factory in the East End of London, which would become their studio space.

[35] The original brickwork was painted a dark brown, offset by two rows of window openings, and a 'floating' roof that appears to hover over the upper level of glazing and recessed decks.