Review by Noémie Goudal The Story of Fixity – Welcome to the Jungle and Please Mind the Puddles | Art and design

IIs it me, or is it hot in here? A forest floats in the dark on three large screens. Each depicts a riot of giant ferns, tangled tree trunks and sun-beaten foliage in a profusion of wet layers. With its mixture of weathered rocks, mossy humidity and tropical plants, you can lose yourself in these scenes. But, when I look, the mist rises above a patch of dense greenery as if someone far away was making a plant mist.

I remember those unconvincing jungles in movies and on TV, where plants were trucked in from some garden center warehouse and arranged on set. Only camera angles and clever editing prevent us from recognizing the trick of it all. In the foreground of one screen, you can see streams of water crossing what appears to be a waterproof mat floor. A small puddle also forms at my feet. Either the film is leaking, although that seems unlikely, or water is dripping from the ceiling. I was told that during the day the water slowly submerges the metal sheets covering parts of the floor, but I arrived too early for the flooding to occur.

Noemi Goodall’s book The Story of Persistence is a complex rumination on ecosystems and the fundamental role of water. Her work involves biology, geology, scientific research, and what she calls “fixed points” in relation to distances, depths, and human perception. I don’t understand half of it and I’m not sure it matters. In a soundscape created by French electronic artist and DJ Chloé Thevenin, the air pulses with the noise and chirping of insects and animal cries and calls, which transform into electronic hums, rhythmic beats and hollow echoes.

Nature is not the primary concern in Goodall’s art. It gives us the illusion and then takes it away again, transforms it and transforms it into something else. On screen, the forest fades into something that looks like a two-tone green illustration in an old encyclopedia, or a collection of engravings stitched together in a layered display of incomprehensible fertility and chaos. This also falters, as if the ink in the images is running, or turning into watercolor that slowly runs and coagulates as it melts.

Each abstract screen becomes pigmented. Slowly sliding across the screens is a film of gray and ochre, iron-rich reds and refreshing yellows. As you watch, the forest disintegrates. The screens themselves are not flat, but are made of a number of raised surfaces whose cut edges conform, more or less, to the shapes of the foliage and rocks projected onto them. As the natural color slowly fades from images, the cut edges of these layered displays become more apparent.

I inevitably think of painting, of the countless artists who have transformed landscapes into abstractions of one kind or another. Goodall’s studio-related forests are all an artifice, and she is only a painter in the occasional sense. Not so much free-form abstraction as it is a thorough decomposition of the image, there is pleasure in seeing Goodall’s imaginary world disappear. But her use of pictorial pigments and pigments, real liquid watercolor paint, and drips and puddles on the floor, is a bit too theatrical in its favour.

Goodall’s mixture of photography and film, real and imaginary, reveals its technical complexities even as it decomposes and dismantles itself, over and over again in 15-minute cycles. This constant flux of creation and destruction leaves me no wiser about the processes that support life on Earth, or about how we perceive the natural world. Instead, it is an evolving theatre, full of its own complexities. I don’t mind the immersion, but I wouldn’t go swimming.