The French artist’s uses photography and lo-fi props to visualise timescales outside of human perception.
Noémie Goudal visualises timescales beyond human perception. Her illusionistic installations, composed of cutouts, photography and simple sleights of hand, articulate the movement of tectonic plates and great spans of planetary evolution.
“The science is the grounding and my inspiration. Then you have how it’s made and the optical illusions I’m trying to create,” the 41-year-old Parisian artist says, when we meet in her London gallery on an unseasonably warm autumn morning.
“This then brings me to larger questions around our relationship with the land. We think of it as a fixed entity, with borders, oceans and our maps, as if it has never changed. But take a map of 300mn years ago: you can’t imagine a fluidity between then and now. There’s a writer who said a mountain is a wave on the level of deep time. When I read that, I saw mountains totally differently.”
Installed in a cavernous railway arch near London Bridge, her new work for public art commissioners Artangel, A Story of Fixity, takes water cycles as its subject. Three vast plywood screens fill the space, each cut in layers of leaf shapes and arranged like theatre scenery (with the construction visible on the rear, an identifying mark of Goudal’s work).
Onto these are projected footage of what appears to be a lush, wet, landscape of tropical foliage. But as you watch, the jungle is revealed to be layered paper backdrops, washed away by rain. Around these screens, water drops onto metal sheets, further increasing the impression of the “leaking, humid space” Goudal says she wanted to create.
“The brief was to do something I’d never done before,” she explains with relish. Goudal became captivated by the facts of water’s ever-cycling persistence on Earth, and began asking how it has shaped landscapes over the past four billion years.
“Water interconnects territories,” she says, “its movement nurtures one landscape, then another . . . For me as a non-scientific person, I don’t now look at the river in the same way. I don’t even look at a glass of water in the same way. It made me think of all the things within the land that you can’t necessarily see”. Like most of her work, A Story of Fixity uses relatively low-tech means — plywood screens and projectors — but by playing with our assumptions about what we see, the installation animates profound scientific ideas (often rooted in current scholarship around palaeoclimatology), prompting us to think about invisible planetary systems.
Alongside the Artangel show, Goudal also has an exhibition And yet it still moves at Edel Assanti gallery in London, which includes new work alongside pieces made for the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2024, for which she was shortlisted.
The centrepiece at Edel Assanti is a triptych called “Delta” (2025): three large images with washes of watery pinks, blues and greens over impressionistic plant-forms in steamy terrariums. At first glance they look like paintings, but on second look are revealed as plants. Specifically, they are approximations of plants from the carboniferous era.
She worked with a palaeobotanist, drawing on research from the Mazon Creek fossil beds in Illinois, where 309mn years ago, various environmental conditions preserved enormous amounts of plant matter. She cut leaves to prehistoric shapes, bulldog clipping them to taped-together branches, and photographing them in the studio behind textured glass.
“The glass texture allows a visual trick where anything near the glass appears very sharp,” she explains, pointing to the crisp skeletal fronds of a fern, “then as soon as you move backwards, it gets more blurred. It’s a representation not just of how memory works, but also how it is for scientists finding traces of something this far back in time.”
Goudal often leaves her physical “workings” intentionally on view, showing visible wires, tape, clips, supports and other pieces of staging, and steers clear of obvious digital manipulations.
“As soon as I use something too polished it doesn’t work,” she says. “It’s about creating balance — to show the fragility of the constructions, and our understanding of our landscape and environment. But if you show too much, it becomes about that, and I want it to be something you question.”
Stepping into the studio to make “Delta” opened up new freedoms — equivalent to moving from landscape photography into portraiture. Her previous work often involved photographic shoots in the landscape, such as the small, subtly luminous work “Rocks” (2024) that greets gallery visitors.
A photo pinned simply to the wall, it’s subtly illuminated by projections that trace torchlight sweeping over the rock in the picture. It’s not quite a photo, but not a film either. “The image I had was about how scientists, with the metaphorical light of their knowledge discovered traces in the landscape,” she explains.
These traces are of the dust that covered much of the planet and can be found in rocks all over the world, marking the cataclysmic effect of the Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth 66mn years ago. “This trace dates to the moment that created this black dust,” she says. “There is an amazing link there for me as a visual artist. Those researchers helped me rethink the landscape with a very different eye.”
Goudal grew up in France, and studied in London at Central Saint Martins, then did an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art. She had a commercial practice, shooting portraits and the like, but during the past 15 years has produced an impressive body of work, taking in architecture, mountains, forests and a range of landscapes from deep prehistory.
One of these is in the rear of Edel Assanti, titled “Grande Vide” (2024). It is a video ostensibly of a cave: a trompe-l’oeil layering of photographs mounted on prop glass (like sugar glass used in films). Each one shatters in rumbling subterranean sound effects, leaving its suspending wires behind. Each one promises to reveal the “real” cave behind the printed scenery, but never does.
Crucial to the illusion is the sound. “If I drop a piece of paper and give it the sound of metal, suddenly you think I’ve dropped metal,” she says. “With Amaury [Arboun, the sound designer for ‘Grande Vide’] I asked how I could give a gravity, texture and materiality to what I’m filming, so suddenly my paper backdrops come alive.”
Whether a photograph is animated, mounted in layers or hung, Goudal’s compelling illusions stitch several timelines together. The human timeline is in her camera shutter, but her tricks and expanded shoots effectively pan out to give a still landscape a sense of movement, or connect it to a past so far back we cannot easily conceive of it.
“What I find fascinating about photography is the flatness of it,” she says. “It can’t be changed, but I’m always trying to change it. It’s what photography is lacking that I’m interested in.
