Roger Noakes was born in Sydney, but travelled to Adelaide in 1974 to study art at the South Australian School of Art. He became involved with the experimental Art Foundation and first exhibited with them and with an exhibition of Some Recent art from Adelaide that toured Australia in 1977. On graduation he became a founding member of the South Australian Workshop (SAW) an artists’ cooperative at 7 Rutland Place, Adelaide. He stayed there, refining his practice, until 1988.
In 1993 he was awarded a Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship and used this to travel to Dundee in Scotland where he completed an MFA. On his return to Australia with his wife, the artist Alison Goodwin, he became an environmental art coordinator with Newcastle City Council’s Building Better Cities program. He has subsequently evolved this practice into an independent consultancy based in the Hunter Valley and New England region.
