Artist Statement
During the past years, Noemie Goudal’s works have predominantly focused on photographic images resulting from ‘volumique conceptions’; sculptures and installations that are carefully connected to specific spaces before being photographed. The fabrication is essential to the practice, however, the act of taking the picture transforms the object and consequently the image becomes the object itself. Through the process of building sets that enact within found locations, Goudal produces versatile spheres, which offer new perspectives to the photographic canvas.
The series explore self-contained lands such as islands and lost paradises, where tangible spaces are often cultivated through the map of human’s imagination. The images invite into scopes that are geographically undecided, that neither exist in reality nor in fiction. Unlike utopias that are always set in the realm of invention, those places can be defined as heterotopias; a term coined by Michel Foucault in the late 60’s that refers to spaces of otherness, coinciding physical and mental implications. In some images, Goudal uses devices such as large-scale paper backdrops, that, juxtaposed with a landscape invites the viewer to enter the space as well as entering the narrative of a ‘make-believe’ environment. Similarly to the existence of the world maintained in an image, Goudal’s scenes embody isolated territories, which grow in parallel to the human time, allowing their own historicity to evolve adequately.
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