Unquiet
Things

A pale face emerges from a writhing, slithering mass of beetles and larvae, yet Jana Heidersdorf’s macabre portrait mesmerizes, not disturbs. In her cover art for the gothic metal project Wurmpalast, inspired by Poe’s Ligeia, insects arrange themselves into baroque adornments around serene features while a lone specimen makes its pilgrimage across her lips. The beetles become ornamental headdress transforming infestation into coronation. Decomposition, but make it elegant devastation.

When I was curating The Art of Darkness and later, The Art of Fantasy, Jana’s work found its way into both collections. She finds genuine beauty in traditionally unsettling imagery and tenderness in decay. Her approach to the darker things feels emotionally vulnerable rather than gratuitous or manufactured for shock.

Consider her mermaids, which she’s created by the dozens. The Queen of Eels pulses with inner light in crushing ocean depths, her elongated form more alien than human, while serpentine creatures coil around her in devoted attendance. She commands these deep-sea dwellers through presence alone. Jana paints underwater realms in midnight blues and greens where strange creatures generate their own light. Her mermaids feel genuinely otherworldly and more than a little terrifying, closer to what such beings might actually be if they ruled kingdoms we can’t fathom.

Her fairy tale reimaginings reveal similar subversive instincts. In “Wolfwood,” the beast has grown large enough to encompass entire forests within its dark fur, each strand housing shadowed trees and hidden paths. His luminous eyes burn like twin moons above a tiny figure in red…but this isn’t the cowering child of familiar stories. She stands her ground in the starlit clearing, neither fleeing nor advancing, her posture suggesting curiosity and wonder rather than fear; she’s genuinely interested in this encounter. The blue-gray mist shrouding the trees gives it a dreamlike quality, and we’re not sure if this is a nightmare, but we’re also not afraid to find out.

There’s a ritualistic quality to many of her pieces that speaks to deeper mythologies. “Dreambird” captures a covenant sealed in crimson, not violence but offering, as a small brown bird pierces a ghostly palm in one clean swoop. Each feather rendered with medieval manuscript devotion, the creature becomes both communion wafer and consecrating priest. The blood that wells speaks not of wound but willing sacrifice, each ruby drop a prayer offered up. Against mottled jade darkness, the pale hand becomes altar, the bird transformed from woodland creature into mystical messenger.

“Spider’s Cradle” continues this theme of sacred exchange. Death extends jewelry with a grandmother’s care, skeletal fingers cradling web-work as if spun from moonbeams. Each dewdrop caught in the strands gleams like baroque pearls while a white spider bears a ruby birthmark – the crimson sigil of small sovereignty. The phantom face veiled in green shadows suggests inheritance rather than transaction, ancient wisdom passed from bone to the eight-legged makers of delicate snares.

Not everything dwells in shadow. In “Apparition,” the night sky’s dreams of swans takes wing in luminescent clouds. The ethereal bird materializes from stardust, its form shifting between solid grace and celestial vapor as it glides through velvet darkness. Below, a solitary figure witnesses from their balcony – summoner or blessed observer, we can’t tell. It’s the artist at her most hopeful, yet mystery persists even in gentler visions.

Her book cover work demonstrates how these sensibilities translate to commercial projects. For Don’t Let the Forest In, a formal portrait fissures along organic lines as wild roses and thorned branches spill through tears in the photographic surface. A pale butterfly settles among the chaos. A crimson stain spots a collar. Violence and fragility. Blood and wings.

“Tears,” created for Month of Fear 2018, captures a nocturnal being that could be timeless elemental spirit or simply someone out past their bedtime. The question hovers in wide, unblinking eyes – one of which nestles a tiny white spider like a glowing moonstone. What slumbering spirits is she communing with? What midnight magics is she calling forth?

In “Make a Devil Out of Me,” elongated fingers curve into a shape that could be horns – or is it just the way pale hands twist in darkness? Each fingertip sharpens to wicked points while rose vines coil around bone-thin digits. Above, lurid red eyes glower from shadows. Are we seeing transformation, or just the power of suggestion? The pose suggests both invitation and challenge – someone who already feels monstrous finally showing us what they see in the mirror.

Jana finds the sacred in decay, the tender in transformation. Her creatures don’t exist to frighten but to reveal something true about change, about how what we fear might actually offer gifts, how the grotesque can reveal hidden forms of grace, how what repels and disturbs us, what we instinctively avoid might be precisely what we need to see. Through her art, Jana proposes that wisdom often wears frightening masks, that beauty and horror might be closer companions than we’d like to admit. That perhaps our discomfort is a compass, pointing toward the truths we’re not yet ready to face but desperately need to find. That change isn’t something to endure but something to embrace, that our deepest growth might come from the very deepest, darkest places.

Below are a few more of my favorites among the dispatches from the dark corners of Jana’s imagination…

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?