Description
‘Inner Fire’ by Nona Limmen
Artist: Nona Limmen
Title: ‘Inner Fire’
Medium: Photograph printed on Canon Premium Plus Photo Paper (signed and dated on the back – limited edition of 3)
Dimensions: 11″ x 8.5″
Framing: Unframed
Year of Creation: 2021
About the Artwork:
The sheer power of taking the darkness and turning it into light. Shadows & silhouettes, it is something so abstract yet so significant. It leaves the mind with a blank to fill with whatever our imagination dreams up, something real or imagined. A part of ourselves we have disowned in the darkest depths of our psyche, conscious or unconscious memories, faint nightmares, or maybe suppressed secrets. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Carl Jung: “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness’s of other people. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
About the Artist:
In her experimental dark art photography, Nona Limmen (1986) channels the darker side of life by painting gloomy fairytales with the camera’s lens. The Beverwijk born studied psychotherapist has worked with international clients, exhibits and galleries around the world. She plays with melancholic symbolism, dark folklore, occultism, heavy metal and shadow work, sometimes profoundly unnerving, sometimes inviting and alluring – her range widely varying by combining soft and ethereal beauty with barren landscapes. Nona Limmen’s haunting protagonists are creatures born of folklore, mythology, and the collective unconscious. Her photos capture them as they dance along the borders between our world and theirs. Perhaps, if you approach with just the right offering, one of them might grant you a glimpse or even passage into their realm, part dream and part nightmare.
Her lense serves as a liminal zone that draws you in and makes the world around you fall away as you’re drawn through a portal of her own creation. Whether in dramatic black and white or vividly artworks tinted in purples and reds, the Amsterdam based photographer offers you a glimpse into a world nebulously bordering our own, a realm where the visible melts into the unseen. But be warned. There’s no return from where you are going.