Curator Emma Thomson
Telluris (from the Latin tellüs for the earth) extends Goudal’s earlier investigations into the sky to focus upon the earth. Journeying through Goudal’s installation, the viewer will encounter works from the artist’s last three photographic series; each depicting what look to be remote mountainous landscapes. Three-dimensional in appearance, the images are often in fact two-dimensional backdrops. Re-staged and photographed in the landscape, there is a sense of familiarity about their geological forms and in the surrounding natural environment. At the same time, the mise-en-scène of each work reveals subtle elements of carefully constructed artifice; which disrupts the viewer’s perception of a unified mountain.

This discontinuity introduces a sense of ambiguity and encourages the viewer to question their sense of place: is this mountain scene real or imagined? Goudal’s ambiguous installation invites us to contemplate how the art of image making might help us to slow down; to look more closely and to think again. Her images ask: How might we think differently about these mysterious landscapes; their existence and evolution beyond the limitations of our senses and the boundaries of human thought?

To find out more about Noémie Goudal’s exhibition Telluris, please refer here for an essay.

BIOGRAPHY
Noémie Goudal is an award-winning French artist who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2010 with an MA in Photography and lives and works in Paris. Goudal’s practice is an investigation into photographs and films as dialectical images, wherein close proximities of truth and fiction, real and imagined, offer new perspectives into the photographic canvas. The artist questions the potential of the image as a whole, reconstructing its layers and possibilities of extension, through landscape installations. Goudal has recently held solo exhibitions in Helsinki, Stockholm, Paris, London and Amsterdam, and her work is held in permanent collections around the world.