Noémie Goudal, Inhale, Exhale, 2021. Single-Channel HD Video, 8:16min, sound. Edition of 5 plus 2 artist's proofs

Noémie Goudal made her name through an ingenious photographic move. In works such as the Observatoire series from 2014, what looks superficially like a straight photograph is not what it seems. Actually, a selection of found architectural imagery has been printed around 2 meters high, pasted onto a wooden framework, and propped in the landscape to be photographed. The apparent durability of stone is the ephemerality of paper. Goudal doesn’t try to disguise this: close inspection reveals slight misalignments and elisions. She trammels between image and reality, between the illusion and its evident artifice, and between manmade and natural, to expose the parallel ways in which both photography and our modelling of the universe appear to depict objective truths, but turn out to be human constructions. The French artist has found many striking ways to insinuate an artificial or photographic landscape into the site she photographs: a polystyrene iceberg, a jungle in a warehouse, a cliff in a vault.

Noémie Goudal, *Post Atlantica*, installation view, Edel Assanti, London, 2022. © Noémie Goudal. Courtesy Edel Assanti. Photo: Will Amlot.

Lately, as revealed by shows in London[i], Paris[ii], and Arles[iii], Goudal has used her artistic language to evoke the deep time of the earth, and in particular to investigate the little-known discipline of paleoclimatology: the branch of science that deals with climates prevalent at particular times in the geological past, or – as Goudal puts it – ‘scientists who are looking at the landscape and trying to find time within it’. So much so that one can trace a scientific article setting out the basis on which pretty much every recent work is based. What those articles demonstrate overall, she says, is ‘how many different metamorphoses the world is going through: we now know the world is 4.5 million years old, has been covered in ice, has been full of black smoke after meteorites hit … it has been changing so much, yet the way we see it is very anthropocentric, is all about how we feel. And we don’t see it moving, because it is so slow that, pretty much since people existed, nothing has changed. For example, the continents were already formed. That makes it hard to acknowledge that we live in a world that is moving all the time. We know that the continents were all together at one time – as Pangea – and in the future, say the scientists, they will all merge again.’ She has called the overall series ‘Post Atlantica’, in reference to how the current configuration of landmasses has emerged from the continent known as Geological Atlantis, which itself emerged from the division of Pangea and contained what became much of Africa and America.

Noémie Goudal, *Untitled (Waves)*, 2022. Inkjet print on photographic paper and triple-channel HD video.
2:45 min, silent, 161 x 112 cm (each), 63 3/8 x 44 1/8 in., 161 x 356 cm (total), 63 3/8 x 140 1/8 in
Edition of 5 plus 2 artist's proofs

Paleoclimatology, then, lies behind Untitled (Waves), 2022. Goudal projects, at imposing scale, slowed-down video footage of the sea over a photographic landscape. Once one has taken in the technical coup of their seamless combination at scale, one sees how two timescales have been combined. They stand in, she says, ‘for human and geological time. And the waves represent the passage of time washing and eating the rocks. They are moving entities themselves, and are causing the metamorphoses. The new ocean led to the coastlines being created.’

Goudal relates that to how Alfred Wegener, over a century ago[iv], built on the common-enough observation that if you look at Africa and South America on a map, they seem ready to fit together – and speculated that this might not be a coincidence. Studying rocks and trees, he found enough apparently linked things to formulate the theory of continental drift in 1912. That means, says Goudal, ‘the ground is moving, and the Sahara, for example, was once a green swamp. But the deep time of the earth’s changes are very slow. And while scientists know about that, and the effects, they don’t know what will happen when it goes as fast as now seems to be happening – in decades rather than millions of years. What interests me is when human and geological time intertwine. I wanted to marry time stopping and time moving in my own language.’

Continental drift also informs Untitled (Giant Phoenix), 2021, a freestanding four metre sculptural work which appears to present a flat image of a densely interwoven jungle when seen head on. It is actually a multi-layered three-dimensional installation, constructed of cut-out photographic prints suspended in space, and combining palm groves from different places – the title refers to Phoenix atlantica, a palm found in both South America and western Africa which helped to prove the one-time existence of the Atlantica continent. Goudal explains that her team spent a whole night cutting up the monumental prints – they’d taken a huge printer on location so as to instantly print off a 1:1 photograph of the trees, cut it into strips, pin up these strips over the scene, then shoot the whole together. The result is anamorphic – the effect of perspective is compensated for by size. That means that, while viewers can see the different components as they move around, there is one point at which it comes together perfectly as a single image. That acts as an analogy for how geological history came into focus in the understanding of the common origin of the palms[v].

The photographic triptych, Plongée, 2021, interrupts soaring mountains with what initially seems to be a flat, right-angled section of smooth rock. Closer inspection reveals it to be a section of cardboard, so suggesting a cross-sectional diagram of the mountain’s inner composition. Goudal’s intervention reflects on the discovery that the rock at the top of the French region of Morbihan reached its present location after a 300,000 year journey, at the start of which it was buried under a mountain as high as the Alps, known as the Armorica Massif. Goudal relates this to an article by Camille Dusséaux[vi], who studied the water inside mountains. ‘She found drops in stones in Brittany that were 300 million years old. She wanted to find how high the mountains had then been, and was able to do so by identifying water from the fossilised teeth of a shark, so indicating the sea level at the time.’ One might say that Dusséaux was cutting the mountain in half in order to understand the movement in it, whereas Goudal does something similar by intervening in the landscape. As Plongée shows, the reality that Goudal seeks to represent in her recent work isn’t the surface captured by the conventional photograph, though of course that is visible, but the underlying reality of the world’s long-term, ever-changing form.

Noémie Goudal, *Untitled (Giant Phoenix)*, 2022. Inkjet print on aluminium and steel, 345 x 389.8 x 352.8 cm, 135 7/8 x 153 1/2 x 138 7/8 in. Edition of 3 plus 2 artist's proofs.

Goudal’s most spectacular paleoclimatological work is the film installation Inhale, Exhale, 2021. We see photographic backdrops – somewhat like stage scenery – emerge from a marshland lake, accompanied by heavy mechanical sounds. As they are hoisted up, the backdrops, depicting images of vegetation drawn from the artist’s archive, transform the landscape. Then the process is reversed: they gradually fall back into the water and vanish beneath it. The point is to imply both changes in climate and the temporary existence of a path across the water. As Goudal explains: ‘I was looking at an article talking about the Bering Strait, which has been important not just geo-politically, but also in the last ice age 18,000 years ago. The ice created a pack and the sea level went down 100 metres, so it was completely possible for Siberians to walk across to America – and that’s how America was first populated. Reading that[vii] made me question what the idea of ‘sea level’ really means – for example the metre appears objective but the measurements are always against the base of sea level, so how do we cope when that shifts?’ As is typical of Goudal, Inhale, Exhale was made in the landscape for real, not by mere digital effects. She confirms that something of a performance was required: ‘We had a very big stretcher around the river, and we had people walking fifteen metres along the forest, holding it up. The backdrops are mounted onto aluminium slices, that why it goes like an accordion inside the water. The soundtrack, from post-production, recreates what I thought it would sound like if the earth were moving – we used rocks and trees cracking, a lot of lava flowing … all real recordings, but mixed together they sound unreal. The sound for me is a way of creating materiality, of bringing heaviness to what is just paper. In a way, it’s 50% of the video.’

A recent series of fifteen ceramic spheres, collectively titled Terrella, 2021, comes from a collaboration with an historian of science who helped Goudal to choose the most important theories of the earth from antiquity to now. Among those selected is Dante’s: in the middle ages people lived with an idea of nine circles of heaven above and nine circles of hell below. Less widely known is a thirteenth century theory that the reason mountains form is that they are attracted by the stars – as depicted in Les montagnes attires par les étiles de Restoro D’Arezzo, 2021. Fourteenth century Parisian philosopher John Buridan thought the world had one sphere inside another, the interaction of which caused the tides. Returning to mountains, the French eighteenth century scientist Jean-Baptiste Élie de Beaumont believed that they followed an underlying pentagonal network. As when a landscape turns out to be largely photographic, an elegant suite of porcelain globes prove to be not so much an exploration of sculptural possibilities as an encoding of the history of how people have seen the world. They make a neat complement to Goudal’s own process of research, exploration and production in order to give artistic expression to the all-too-topical view of the world that paleoclimatology provides.

For more information on Noemie Goudal, please visit here.

Noémie Goudal *Terrella*, 2021.Porcelain, brass, bronze, wood. Variable dimensions. On loan from the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres, France.

[i] Post Atlantica at Edel Assanti, London, 27 Jan – 12 March 2022

[ii] Post Atlantica at Le Grand Café, Paris, 9 Oct 2021 – 2 January 2022.

[iii] Post Atlantica at Les Rencontres d’Arles, 4 July – 12 Sept 2022

[iv] Hallam, A. (1975). Alfred Wegener and the Hypothesis of Continental Drift. Scientific American, 232(2), 88–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24949733

[v] As set out in Eiserhardt, W. L., Svenning, J. C., Kissling, W. D., & Balslev, H. (2011). Geographical ecology of the palms (Arecaceae): determinants of diversity and distributions across spatial scales. Annals of botany, 108(8), 1391–1416. https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcr146

[vi] Camille Dusséaux et al. Meteoric fluid‐rock interaction in Variscan shear zones, Terra Nova (2019). DOI: 10.1111/ter.12392

[vii] In Dryomov, S. V., Nazhmidenova, A. M., Shalaurova, S. A., Morozov, I. V., Tabarev, A. V., Starikovskaya, E. B., & Sukernik, R. I. (2015). Mitochondrial genome diversity at the Bering Strait area highlights prehistoric human migrations from Siberia to northern North America. European journal of human genetics : EJHG, 23(10), 1399–1404. https://doi.org/10.1038/ejhg.2014.286

NOÉMIE GOUDAL: DEEP TIME EXPLORER