French artist Noémie Goudal's latest installation, 'The Story of Fixity,' transforms viewers into explorers of an artificial jungle that slowly dissolves before their eyes. The exhibition features three large screens displaying lush tropical scenes filled with giant ferns, vine-covered tree trunks, and sun-drenched foliage arranged in dense, humid layers. The atmosphere feels intensely warm and humid, creating an immersive environment that initially captivates visitors with its apparent naturalism.
However, the illusion quickly reveals its artificial nature. Mist appears to drift across patches of dense greenery as if someone off-camera were using a plant sprayer, reminiscent of unconvincing jungle sets in movies and television shows. The vegetation looks as though it was transported from a garden center warehouse and carefully arranged on a soundstage. In the foreground of one screen, small streams of water cross what appears to be waterproof matting, while puddles begin forming on the gallery floor. Throughout the day, water slowly floods the metal sheets covering portions of the floor, though early visitors may miss this gradual inundation.
Goudal's complex installation serves as a meditation on ecosystems and water's fundamental role in supporting life. Her work incorporates elements of biology and geology, scientific research, and what she describes as 'fixed points' related to distances, depths, and human perception. The accompanying soundscape, created by French electronic artist and DJ Chloé Thévenin, fills the air with insect buzzing, bird chirping, animal calls, and cries that gradually evolve into electronic sizzling, percussive beats, and hollow echoes.
The artist deliberately avoids naturalism in her work, instead creating illusions that she systematically dismantles and transforms. As viewers watch, the jungle scenes fade into images resembling green-tinted illustrations from vintage encyclopedias or collages of engravings depicting incomprehensible fertility and chaos. These images appear to deteriorate further, as if the ink were running or watercolors were slowly dissolving and curdling.
The transformation continues as each screen becomes an abstract composition of pigmented colors. Projected films show gray and ochre pigments, iron-rich reds, and vibrant yellows slowly sliding down the screens as the jungle deconstructs. The screens themselves are not flat surfaces but consist of multiple relief planes with cut edges that roughly correspond to the shapes of the projected foliage and rocks. As natural colors gradually bleach from the images, these layered screen edges become increasingly visible.
The installation inevitably evokes comparisons to painting and the countless artists who have transformed landscapes into various forms of abstraction. Goudal's studio-created jungles are entirely artificial, making her a painter only in an accidental sense. Rather than representing jungle-like free abstraction, the work presents a thorough dissolution of imagery. While there is pleasure in witnessing Goudal's illusory world wash away, her use of filmed dyes, pigments, and real liquid paint dripping and pooling on the floor occasionally feels overly theatrical.
Goudal's combination of photography and film, reality and illusion, reveals its technical complexities even as it dissolves and reconstructs itself in continuous 15-minute cycles. This constant flux of creation and destruction offers little insight into Earth's life-supporting processes or how humans perceive the natural world. Instead, it presents sophisticated theater that becomes overwhelmed by its own complications. While the immersive experience has its merits, the installation's complexity sometimes overshadows its intended message about natural systems and human perception.
'The Story of Fixity' represents an ongoing Artangel commission currently showing at Borough Yards in London, offering visitors a unique opportunity to experience Goudal's innovative blend of technology, artistry, and environmental commentary.
