Photographer Noémie Goudal: “There Are so Many Layers in an Image.”

Why It Matters

Goudal’s fusion of art and scientific inquiry reshapes how audiences perceive landscape, highlighting planetary history and encouraging interdisciplinary dialogue that bridges visual culture and environmental awareness.

Key Takeaways

• Goudal explores layered composition within flat photographic images.
• She integrates scientific observation, history, and natural landscapes in work.
• Constraints like tides and backdrops drive experimental film and photography.
• Techniques blend real scenery with printed fragments to create hybrid spaces.
• Themes address planetary time, paleoclimatology, and humanity’s fluid relationship with land.

Summary

Noémie Goudal uses photography and film to investigate how a seemingly flat image can contain multiple layers of meaning, perspective, and materiality. Her practice, rooted in early hobbyist experimentation, has evolved into a disciplined inquiry that merges artistic composition with the history of scientific observation, from antiquity to modern paleoclimatology.\n\nGoudal emphasizes constraints—such as tidal schedules on beaches or the limited time of a film shoot—to sharpen her creative process. She constructs elaborate backdrops, printing and cutting photographic slices that are then recombined with live landscapes, creating hybrid scenes that oscillate between reality and abstraction. Projects like "Below the Deep South" and "The Story of Fixity" illustrate her use of sedimentation metaphors, optical tricks, and reverse‑play techniques to visualize geological time and the fluidity of the planet.\n\nSpecific examples include printing large‑format images on site, layering them with rope and tripods to hint at human intervention, and employing water to dissolve night‑time paint, revealing daylight in a single shot. Her recent work on the African Rift, presented at the Pompidou Center, draws on paleoclimatology to depict the continent’s geological fracture as a living, ocean‑forming feature, underscoring the intersection of art, science, and landscape.\n\nBy refusing to anchor her images to a single location, Goudal invites viewers to contemplate the planet as a dynamic, layered entity rather than a static map. Her interdisciplinary methodology expands the vocabulary of contemporary visual art, offering a nuanced lens on humanity’s evolving relationship with Earth’s deep time and environmental processes.

Original Description

Meet French artist Noémie Goudal, who examines our relationship with the natural world through staged, illusionistic installations within the landscape, using film and photography. Goudal’s experiments are informed by her research into geology, paleoclimatology and the history of science, fields to which her work actively responds: “There are so many layers in an image I can compose, decompose, recompose, disrupt,” she says.

“In my work for many years I wanted to see what our relationship with the landscape is and with nature in general, how we look at a land and how we observe it and how we can interpret it.”

Goudal’s work frequently examines how landscapes are constructed — both physically and culturally — and how humans interpret the natural world. For years, she has drawn on the history of science, studying how thinkers from antiquity onward observed the earth and proposed theories about its formation. “It’s a very, very fertile ground,” she says of this research, noting that it provides a conceptual foundation for her projects that span photography, film, installation and performance. Her work comes out not as an illustration but as a response to her studies. In this context Goudal’s interest lies in how she can “compose an image, an image that is flat within the image,” she explains. “There are so many layers that I can compose, decompose, recompose… and there are many perspectives that I can work on.”

Her 2019 film Below the Deep South marked Goudal’s decisive shift from still photography to moving image. The work explores geological sedimentation and the formation of fossil energy, visualizing the slow compression of ancient tropical forests into coal beneath the earth’s surface. The production process is exacting months of preparation culminate in a single, brief shooting window. “Everything is set up and then we have 15 minutes and that’s what we have and then it’s over,” she says. “There is an extreme point of tension when we start the film because we can’t get it wrong.”

Central to Goudal’s practice is a commitment to physical construction over digital manipulation. She prints, cuts, and assembles photographic backdrops on site, often leaving visible traces, for instance, a tripod within the frame. “I want the viewer to be able to somehow understand what we have been through in order to build a landscape,” she says. The partial exposure of artifice becomes a way of embedding the human presence in the image without fully collapsing the illusion.

An important theme in Goudal’s work draws on paleoclimatology, the study of Earth’s climatic past. Through this lens, she has come to see the planet as dynamic and unstable rather than fixed. “Through the eyes of the paleoclimatologist, you can suddenly look at the world as, first of all, as a moving entity,” she says. “We are part of this movement, of course.” While she avoids overtly didactic statements about climate change, her work situates humanity within a vast temporal scale. “We are very small, you know, in this very long discourse,” she reflects.

In projects such as Grand Vide (2024), inspired by the Great African Rift, Goudal explores the idea of land as an active force, shaped by tectonic pressures beyond human control. Across her oeuvre, landscapes are neither fixed nor singular; they are composites drawn from a personal archive of images captured around the world, assembled into terrains that resist precise geographic identification. The result is a body of work that merges scientific inquiry with theatrical staging, emphasizing experimentation, collaboration and the productive role of chance.

Noémie Goudal (born 1984, Paris, France) is a French visual artist known for her large-scale photographic and film installations that explore landscape, geology and the history of science. She studied at Central Saint Martins in London and holds a master’s degree in Photography at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2010. She has exhibited internationally in museums and biennials. Her work has been shown at institutions including the Tate Modern, London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and in 2024 she was a finalist for the Prix Marcel Duchamp. Noémie Goudal lives and works in Paris.

Noémie Goudal was interviewed by Christian Lund in her studio in Paris in January 2026.02.26

Camera: Rasmus Quistgaard

Edit: Nanna Dahm

Produced by Christian Lund

Music via Upright:

“Scientific Cosmic Soundscape” by John Goldham

“Dream Catcher” by Alice Guerlot-Kourouklis

“Somewhere In The Light” by Ben Stone

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026.

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