The kind of stories we let photography tell are increasingly fragmented, something interior that resists the gravity of coherent narrative and neat endings. These are the stories of experience itself, sprawling, messy, perpetually unresolved. This work often has a particularly rewarding kind of ambiguity to it, as can be seen in Mirjam Siefert’s intriguing series Heaven is Under Construction. It remains perhaps the most fundamental kind of narrative, that of a journey, and if it is not always of place, then is, at least, of consciousness. The restless dark of these landscapes, their weight, bleeds into the portraits too, certainties become indeterminate, bearings are lost. Siefert brings out a sense of impermanence that seems so deeply woven into the fabric of our lives as to all but interchangeable with it.
Recently exhibited at Dublin’s Severed Head gallery (their website) the rest of the series can be seen here.
