Les Amants (Cascade)

From a distance, Noémie Goudal’s Les Amants (Cascade) looks like a photograph of a waterfall coursing through a forest. A closer look reveals the illusion: formed of translucent white sheets of plastic strung between trees and splashed in folds and ripples on the ground, the water is an entirely synthetic construction. Informed by an interest in stagecraft as much as the interfaces between nature and culture, Goudal’s photo posits plastic – with all its connotations of falsehood and artifice – as having supplanted rivers in its centrality to our environment. The setting echoes the forested sublime of German Romantic painting, but the river’s emphatic stasis seems to subvert rather than celebrate the majesty of the natural world. As the series title Les Amants (‘The Lovers’) indicates, however, nature and culture are in many ways co-dependent, and creative interplay between the two can forge new and surprising realities.