"Noémie Goudal evokes a world on the road to ruin, a world that rebuilds itself differently."
If Noémie Goudal’s work seems to offer multiple ways in which it can be approached, this is because it maintains ambiguous connections with reality, relationships that are revealed to be the very essence of her universe—for it is indeed a universe that we can speak of with regard to her work. This universe spans from her selection of sites for her photographs to the installation of large format images in unusual places.
Many of her photographs show enigmatic constructions, modern ruins for which concrete seems to be the favoured material, that of a dessicated and soulless civilisation whose utopias have drowned in who knows what lake. It is nature that has taken over; we will return to this later. By working on this kind of 20th century archaeology, its dreams of greatness or of conquests with a totalitarian or industrial vision, Noémie Goudal’s work fits within the tradition of artists of the same generation, such as Geert Goiris and Guillaume Lemarchal *, with close ties to photography, or Cyprien Gaillard who, like Goudal, uses several media. Through their implacable images, they also examine the vestiges and aberrations of certain aspects of our civilisation such as it has developed in the 20th century. For Noémie Goudal, the series Haven Her Body Was evokes a world on the road to ruin, a world that rebuilds itself differently. She questions the fragility and the power of nature and the relation it maintains with man: ruins were a departure point; then it is nature that takes over human constructions. Thus the latter have been destroyed by violent natural elements, such as hurricanes or the force of the sea.