French artist Noémie Goudal works across many media but her entry point, she says, “is always through photography”. Fascinated by palaeoclimatology and palaeobotany—the scientific studies of the geological past—Goudal explores the intertwining of space and time in her ambitious oeuvre. One of the ways she does this is through illusionistic landscape installations that gradually evolve before the viewer’s eyes, as each layer of the constructed décor dissolves, explodes or peels away. This interest in the temporality of landscapes can be traced back, she tells us, to her formative years as an art student in the sprawling setting of London.
Now based in her native Paris, Goudal is very much in demand, whether in France, the UK or further afield: having previously exhibited at the V&A, the Tate Modern and the Pompidou Centre, Goudal was nominated for the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2024 and has 16 exhibitions around the world scheduled for 2025. She took a break from working on her upcoming projects—including a large-scale installation for the Grand Paris Express—to talk to us from her studio in Belleville, in the north-east of Paris.
KIM LAIDLAW: How would you introduce yourself and your practice to those who are yet to discover your work?
NOÉMIE GOUDAL: I would say I’m a visual artist. I’ve been working with photography, installation, videos, and, most recently, performance, and sculptures as well but my first entry point is through photography because that has allowed me to work on-site and to bring the experience back into the work itself.
KL: You grew up in Paris but decided to study in London. What influenced that decision?
NG: I went to Central Saint Martins, then the Royal College of Art for my master’s. I wanted to leave France and discover new things in a more international context. I wanted to be in a less comfortable zone. Paris in the 1990s felt comfortable and not really that fun. When I arrived in Brick Lane, in Shoreditch, in the early 2000s, there were these wastelands, zones left as empty fields right in the middle of the city. It was very new to me, as a Parisian, to have so much space: your brain wants to fill it with things. And that’s something that I realised later in my studies: why are people attracted to follies in gardens, for example? Why are they so enchanted? One of the explanations is that the brain is so eager to fill in the gaps. When it sees a ruin, the brain imagines what happened there before and what will happen to this place. The landscape in London at the time was quite mad. It was like a playground and we had space to do things while being at the centre of a huge capital city buzzing with many nationalities. As an art student, it was the best place to be.
KL: Did you feel freer there? I’ve always thought that London was more open-minded than Paris.
NG: Exactly. In the south of Paris, where I went to school, people would look at you a lot and scan you. In London, you could be anonymous and that was very refreshing for me. I could just do my own thing and I had the space for creation, which I didn’t feel in Paris, where everything was so perfect and beautiful already. Now I’m not affected by that anymore; I have other ways to create.
KL: When did you move back to Paris?
NG: In 2013. My husband made me rediscover the north of Paris—Belleville, Ménilmontant—a different Paris, filled with people who are not from Paris, and I felt like I could belong there. It felt a little bit like London.
KL: Your studio seems like a refuge—is that how you see it? I expect it depends on what you’re working on, and what stage of the project you are at.
NG: Completely. At the moment, it’s mad because I’m working on a photo shoot for the Grand Paris Express project [the greater Par-
is transport extension], for which each station has an architect working in tandem with an artist. I’m working on the metro station Blanc-Mesnil, where I am creating an image that will be printed on the station’s glass windows. I shot the photos in my studio, with a textured glass that has a patina on it: it represents what I call a palaeo-greenhouse with a lot of trees from the carboniferous era that don’t exist anymore. I worked with a palaeobotanist to see what trees we could use that still exist and inventing new trees as well. We took pictures of tree fossils and then used them to remake trunks. There are some trees where you’ll say, “They don’t exist; I
have never seen a tree like that,” but if you walk past quickly, you won’t be able to notice this.
KL: What sparked your interest in palaeobotany and palaeoclimatology?
NG: It’s always about the relationship with the landscape, trying to look at it through many different angles. Palaeoclimatology came quite naturally because it was about looking at the landscape through not only what it looks like now, but through what it has gone through in order to be what it is now. I always consider my research as a sort of springboard. It’s a foundation—then I digest all the information and I recreate through that. I saw a film about [French glaciologist] Claude Lorius where he was digging big cores of ice. The deeper he went into the ice, the deeper he went in time; in the core of ice, you can see all the layers of time. There was something very magical about it but, at the same time, it was visually very impacting: suddenly space and time could be physically intertwined. My work is about this intertwining of space and time. I really feed off science and that then brings me to more philosophical questions about what is, for example, the movement of the landscape. We see the planet as a fixed entity, but, through the eyes of the palaeoclimatologist, it’s in constant flux of movement: we live on tectonic plates that are evolving, drifting. Obviously, on a human timescale, you can’t perceive that, but if you look through their eyes, through millions of years, you can. I found that fascinating. Once I had researched that, I started to work with papers that were melting, making decors disappear, and having fires that destroyed the landscape, but also offered the possibility of seeing what the next landscape is behind. That’s how it started.
KL: And we see all these different layers, strata, in your work.
NG: Definitely. It happened quite naturally that looking at the geological layers of the planet—physical layers and layers of time—brought me to my image-making. I create an image and within it are many layers that can be peeled, deconstructed and reconstructed. I’m always playing with the layers and the surface as well. For example, I made a film called Inhale, Exhale where there is the surface of the water, and decors coming up and down. It’s about the surface but also about what is out of the frame that you can’t see. When you frame something in a photograph, you propose something that the viewer will imagine, not only for what it is, but for what is around it. The frame imposes this sort of trick on the brain. I play with different strata in a lot of my work, actually. And when you look at a landscape you can only imagine what is underneath it. You know there is something under- neath it that you can’t see, and your brain does the work of inventing what is below it. These are questions that I asked myself a lot when I created Post Atlantica, which is a big body of work about palaeoclimatology.
KL: The two pieces exhibited for the Prix Marcel Duchamp, Grand Vide and Supra Strata, are filmed from a fixed viewpoint and in a vertical format. Is there any reference to the verticality of our mobile phones and how we’re looking at what’s happening in the world through our screens?
NG: I hadn’t thought of a phone screen, but there might be something about that which is completely subconscious. It’s also the monumentality: when you have a vertical screen, it stands like a painting. Our relationship to a film that is vertical is very different. It’s also the way water travels through the landscape: it reminded me of the Chinese waterfall, or the first way we looked at landscapes. People say that the word landscape started to exist through the Chinese landscapes of water circulating through mountains. The author François Jullien wrote a book about this and how we first started to think of landscape as a concept.
KL: There is an absence of human figures in your work, yet we can see the presence of the manmade in the tears of paper, the visible strings and cables, etc. Why is this?
NG: When I had humans in my pictures, years ago, it was too much. As soon as I stripped the humans out of the picture, there was more space for the viewer to be the human in the work. A human gives a narrative, a context, a socio-political context, and I’m doing everything I can to erase that from the image in order to give information but not too much; to create a balance. If you are in front of the picture, you can fill it with your own things, as a person, on that precise day, depending on the weather that day or the person you are next to. The implication of the viewer is so important in those works. People come with their own baggage and I can’t really change that, but I need to leave the space for that to happen: a meeting point. And if you give too much information, you don’t have that. And with film and photography especially you can give a lot of information. It’s about stripping as much as you can to give the essence.
KL: So your work isn’t a critique of climate change?
NG: I’m trying to work with studies that are much larger than just our concerns on climate. Obviously, it’s something I think of as a citizen, but not directly in my work because, especially with Post Atlantica, the scientists that I talked to are dealing with a much larger temporality. I’m more interested in the philosophical relationship that we have with the landscape. But we have excluded ourselves from the wilderness for so long that we are isolated. Maybe there is a part of us that wants to rediscover that now, but I’m scared that if we do, will we invade all the zones that are still untouched? We have a very strange relationship nowadays with the landscape. If we put climatic concerns to one side and just think about much simpler questions about a landscape—the form of a mountain, the tides, how long a cave has been there—I think it could still be possible to have a relationship. I’m not saying we shouldn’t think of climate change, because I know it’s there and we can’t help it, but we can look at it through an angle that is much, much larger. That’s why
the palaeoclimatologists are so radical; their research helped me to see with a larger angle: larger in terms of time and in terms of physicality. Because suddenly, when you try to imagine—for example, for this work for Le Grand Paris—how a landscape was in the carboniferous era, all your preconceptions go away; you have to reconsider the whole thing. And I like this feeling of vertigo. I like this huge shift that the brain finds hard to imagine.
KL: Could tell me more about the sound in your video pieces?
NG: I work with a sound engineer/designer. Nothing is recorded during filming, because it’s very chaotic and you can hear us shouting— every film is like a performance and it’s quite stressful because you can only do it once, especially with fire. I love how sound can give gravity or lightness to something; you can reinvent materiality with sound. It’s amazing and the brain obviously does the work putting it together. I’m working on a new piece at the moment, and the sound will play an important role because all of my work is about illusion and sound helps that.
KL: Talking of illusion, you often use anamorphosis in your work. What effect do you hope to create in the viewer with this sort of trompe l’oeil?
NG: It’s exploring all the possibilities of a frame. When you have a frame, as we were saying earlier, you give a border. And, through illusion, you can really develop and unfold all the strata, and it’s only through optical illusion that you can do that. I’m interested in leading the viewer to question the image in every way, to question what they’re really looking at. That’s also why I give clues to the construction: when you see the paper clips or the bits of tape and ropes, the viewer is involved in the work in a more intimate way. Because, now, with Photoshop or AI, that’s another layer of understanding an image.
KL: Would you consider using AI in your work? Or is seeing the handmade aspect of the trickery—the paper clips and bits of tape that you just mentioned—essential?
NG: For me it’s essential. And it’s important to live an adventure. I go to a mountain with my team, I build something: what you see are the traces of that adventure. If you haven’t lived anything, can you still do it by pretending? Could I use AI in another way, not necessarily to build something, but in a performance with some kind of robot that would be triggered by AI? I don’t know.
KL: How much of the process do you control and how much do you leave to chance? Is there a protocol, for example, for your videos?
NG: It’s a bit of both. I try to give a framework that is as organised as possible. It’s also a question of keeping the team motivated. Otherwise, it’s tiring when something isn’t working and we have to do it again. Then again, you never know what will happen with the light, what time of the day we will finish the installation and shoot. Or, for example, in the film Below The Deep South, how the fire affects the paper is really up to chance. But I try to be as prepared as possible so that we come back with something that everybody is proud of. Otherwise, there’s no point.
KL: Your projects are often on a considerable scale. Do you ever work on smaller pieces?
NG: I recently did a series of very simple black-and-white pictures of an amorphous construction, called White Pulse. It’s the same image printed five times and I fold the paper in order to recreate the curvature of the space. The process was not simple—it took six months of research to make this possible in terms of optical illusion—but the execution was. I wasn’t on my own; I always work with at least one or two people, but it felt good. It’s about balance. I’m working on a very big project for London and at the same time, I’m creating something in the studio that is smaller. I like to mix things, so every day is different.