Noémie Goudal’s work is spellbinding. Stand before one of her photographs, videos, sculptures or performances and you’re instantly mesmerized – transported to an otherworldly terrain. Yet, unlike most illusionists, Goudal is generous with her secrets. She pulls back the curtain, revealing the strings and scaffolding behind the mirage: the paper that forms her sets, the mechanisms that animate them, the scientific findings that underpin her thinking. In fact, since the early 2010s, her practice has been grounded in palaeoclimatology – the study of ancient climates and geological strata.
Perhaps the most magical aspect of Goudal’s work is her ability to photograph what once was – to conjure visions of a world that predates not only the invention of photography but human existence itself. Her work asks how we might visualize deep time. Goudal gives us the fantasy of witnessing what no human has ever witnessed. What we see, how we see and what we project sits at the heart of her work. The moving-image piece Rocks (2024), on show at Edel Assanti this autumn, uses optical illusion as a visual metaphor for our flawed perception of permanence in nature. What appears fixed is, in fact, precarious. And yet, as with all her works, this apparition is not meant to deceive – it’s there to deepen our understanding.
Goudal’s rooting of her work in scientific inquiry extends beyond mere aesthetics. She translates geological data into images and immersive installations, rendering accessible ideas and landscapes that most of us might never otherwise encounter. This autumn, London will be shaped by Goudal’s distinctive ‘magic-scientific’ practice. Her work will be on view at the Deutsche Bank lounges at both Frieze London and Frieze Masters and at Edel Assanti gallery, where she will show the new photographic series, Delta (2025).
Born in Paris in 1984, Goudal moved to London to study graphic design at Central Saint Martins, before completing an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art. Since then, her work has been exhibited at major institutions including the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern and The Photographers’ Gallery. In 2024, she was shortlisted for the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize, France’s equivalent to the Turner Prize.
In his 2009 book Ecology without Nature, philosopher Timothy Morton writes, ‘It is in art that the fantasies we have about nature take shape – and dissolve.’ Morton suggests that artistic representation both creates and destabilizes our understanding of nature – whether as a pristine wilderness or an idealized landscape. Goudal’s work operates in exactly this terrain. When we picture terms like ‘forest’, ‘iceberg’ or ‘grotto’, we summon visual memories shaped by images and direct experience. But what of the geological events that occurred long before such landscapes existed?
Goudal’s work explores this deep history of the earth – studying, interpreting and narrating events that predate human life and disturbance. Long before the Anthropocene – the era defined by human impact on the planet’s ecosystems and geology – earth was already writing its own layered story. While the naming of our current epoch remains subject to debate – with terms like Capitalocene, Plantationocene and Chthulucene all vying for attention – there is a consensus that we now inhabit a post-industrial, extractive age. This period is rewriting the earth’s systems and, crucially for Goudal, its geological strata.
The presentation across the Deutsche Bank Lounges at Frieze London and Frieze Masters is titled ‘Inhale Exhale’ – a title borrowed from her own video work of 2021 and a neon, on show at the fair, from 2022 – and includes works from 2013 to now. An installation created for the corridor of the lounge at Frieze London is a striking example of the research at the core of her practice. Steel panels line the walls, each bearing intricate sequences of small, printed images drawn from diverse disciplines. One might imagine these as akin to fossils – impressions and remnants of extinct life embedded in the material.
These traces are clues for understanding Goudal’s artistic method. Inside the lounge stands Terrella (2022), a work created in collaboration with a historian of science, consisting of 12 sculptures. Each one visualizes a different cosmological hypothesis about the earth’s formation from antiquity to today. Figures such as Restoro d’Arezzo, Dante Alighieri, Jean Buridan, James Lovelock and Isaac Newton – each a product of their era’s scientific knowledge and cultural imagination – offer competing origin stories. Through Goudal’s lens, these mostly male visions of the world’s beginnings are reanimated with theatricality and wonder. What is science, what is speculation; what is illusion, what is truth? In the end, we are left spellbound – enchanted by Goudal’s sleight of hand, and the seriousness of what it reveals.
