About - Nona Limmen

In her experimental dark art photography, Nona Limmen (1986) channels the darker side of life by painting gloomy fairytales with the camera’s lens. Her photographic world is one of mystery, melancholic and gothic symbolism, occultism, and shadow work, sometimes profoundly unnerving, oftentimes inviting – her range widely varying by combining soft and ethereal beauty with barren landscapes.

These worlds, born from escapism, unequivocally have been a place where she could find home in herself over and over. Limmen’s haunting protagonists are creatures born of dark folklore, mythology, and the collective unconscious. They dance along the borders between our world and theirs, not fully belonging anywhere, therefore belonging everywhere. 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.

· ARTIST STATEMENT ·

Since I was a child, I have been compelled by dark themes and folktales, with a particular fascination for ghostly creatures, witches, and all things surreal and unknown. I longed to immerse myself in worlds full of wonder and discovery, and always imagined myself roaming uncharted territory where untold adventures awaited.

Later in life, this fascination became an intermediary to channel my deepest thoughts and feelings into my work. It is the theme that connects these photos -the longing for another mysterious world, an escape from reality, and to find comfort in darkness.

The intention for my work is to bring what is dark into the light, and to encourage the viewer to explore the darker landscapes of their own shadow self. It’s the darkness that helps us look deeper beyond any light ever will.

Photography helped me find the silver linings in tough and uncertain times, and I can only hope it offers the same to anyone who looks at my work.

“Nona Limmen summons brooding and arcane forces from deep within her subconscious and binds them to film and digital images, these snapshots of menace, mystery and magick snatched from the boiling mists of eternity and suspended in the real so that we may wonder at their dark beauty. Drawing upon various strains of European folklore and a lifelong passion for the odd and the occult, Nona casts a web of pure visual spider-silk, pulling the viewer into her intoxicating world of pagan priestesses, vampire queens and blood-drenched shapeshifters."

"Dutch photographer Nona Limmen is based in Amsterdam, but her marvelous analog photos capture visions of a vast, mystical world nebulously bordering our own. This mysterious land, woven of dreams and memories, is inhabited by powerful women, liminal creatures wielding arcane forces so great they sometimes fracture their very being. Their solitude should never be mistaken for loneliness, they are in need of no one’s rescue.”