All images Courtesy by the artist
For several years, the artist has used photography, video and immersive installation to develop a body of work related to discoveries made by paleoclimatologists. Paleoclimatologists look for clues (fossils, pollen, or carbon atoms captured in ice) that allow them to form hypotheses about past and future climate: how warm was it 300 million years ago? How have tectonic plates shifted and what climatic upheavals did this bring about? Researchers can draw extremely vast conclusions from elements that are sometimes microscopically small: in her work, Noémie Goudal, fascinated by this conceptual vertigo, replays these complex inquiries whereby landscape explains itself in the light of its own history rather than through the prism of the history of mankind. What has landscape been through to get to where it is today? What will it be tomorrow? How could this continuously moving landscape material be translated in physical terms? Using artifice and scenery, optical illusion and trompe-l’oeil, Noémie Goudal’s images sublimate their scientific foundations without abandoning them, opening up onto all kinds of imaginary interpretations.
