For the French artist Noémie Goudal, uncertainty and doubt are key driver in how we engage with and understand the world. Our shifting perspectives are what really shape our encounters, more so than any solid reality.
Goudal takes inspiration from the literary works of Haruki Murakami, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, whose mythical, imagined worlds so often start with a kernel of “truth”, before venturing into surrealism and fantasy. Goudal’s work begins similarly, with her photographing what she sees in front of her, and then unfurls into sculpture, installation and performance, creating constructed landscapes that make us question how we perceive and interact with our environment.
Goudal’s time studying graphic design at London’s Central Saint Martins taught her to think of an image as a “multi-strata” tool, she tells me. “A tool in which I can build a narrative that develops through different layers of perspective.”
These layers – folded, cut, reapplied and rephotographed – are constructed to form something complete and yet somehow lacking. They allude to Goudal’s fascination with geological time and paleoclimatology (the study of ancient climates). We like to believe our landscapes are “fixed entities”, she says, when over geological time they are anything but. “By studying paleoclimatology, I started to reach another level of perceiving the land, that makes us humans feel very small and ephemeral indeed.”
Noémie Goudal, Soulevement I, 2018
Noémie Goudal, COURBURE DE L ESPACE III, 2023
