Siggie is a photographic project that uses a collection of domestic photographs to describe the complex and intimate relationship between a mother and her daughter. Lisbet Nielsen’s work takes the form of a delicate and intimate journey through time and space, and uses 48 Polaroid images to narrate the transformations, beauty and complexity of an everyday life suspended in time.
The photos, taken over a period of seven years during the 1990s, when Lisbet Nielsen lived in three diferent fats with her daughter Siggie, investigate the living spaces, conveying a sense of melancholic intimacy. A corner of the house, the furniture, a ray of light bathing the surface of a table, an open door to a kitchen where we can see a stove and a white chair, a snow-covered landscape, the close observation of lamps and cushions, are, together with a series of portraits of Siggie, from the age of twelve until her pregnancy at the age of eighteen, part of a simple and poignant narrative, whose poetic reality surpasses the enchantment produced by the images themselves to give us a further sense of truth common to all.
The images describe a suspended, poetic, fragile universe that fixnds its origin in the intimate need to narrate the passage of a young girl from child to adult. A gradual and significant change that accompanies her living environments, seeking in this oscillation of glances between them and herself a form of balance and orientation. The images, which have remained in the drawer for many years, have waited for the need to mature for a cathartic gesture that would allow Nielsen to free herself of emotional embarrassment and to select and juxtapose the images in such a way as to make the poignant private narrative capable of producing a universal formal discourse. Moreover, the very subject of this delicate work revolves around such an ancient and founding relationship, that of the mother and the child, which has always involved and crossed the fgurative traditions of all times and which continues to be today, as it was four thousand years ago, a subject whose narration does not exhaust its power, wonder or mystery.
Lisbet Nielsen (born 1957) is a Danish fne art photographer living and working in Copenhagen. Nielsen holds a postgraduate diploma in fne art photography from the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, and has exhibited in Denmark, Poland, Scotland, China, Finland and Germany. Siggie is her frst book.