"I portray, the manner in which young girls interact with each other in the process of establishing an understanding of the private and public realms of intimacy.
Intertwined with this is the growing awareness of the power of their sexuality and the way in which these girls/women cope with this new awareness." - Deborah Paauwe
Intertwined with this is the growing awareness of the power of their sexuality and the way in which these girls/women cope with this new awareness." - Deborah Paauwe
Deborah Paauwe was born in Pennsylvania in the United States in 1972 and gradually moved to Adelaide, South Australia in 1985. During her childhood she travelled the world with her missionary parents and two brothers, graduating from the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia with a Bachelor of Arts and in 2000 completed MA Fine Art at the Chelsea College of Art and Design followed by a multitude of degrees, which reflect her depth of artistic study. In 1999, she was awarded an Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship and in 2004 undertook an Australia Council studio residency in New York. Paauwe has been previously commissioned to work with Hugo Boss, Josh Goot, Hermes, and Marie Claire magazine.
Heralded as one of Australia’s most successful young contemporary photo media artists, Paauwe’s sensuous, asymmetrical framed photographic images of girls and young women reveal the clandestine and saturated world of youthful recollections. Paauwe’s deliberate act of obscuring and erasing the girl’s faces and thus individualising features and personality from view compels the audience to scrutinise the detail presented, that is the slight rise of the hand, the fall of the hair, the subtle remanent of bruises, rashes and the stain of recently removed nail polish which all add substance to Paauwe’s work. Paauwe manipulates the notion of innocence as a quality associated to the young, many of Paauwe’s works have a discordant and unharmonious quality, of incompleteness and discomfort whilst conveying an omnipresent sense of beauty – though at numerous points, polished to perfection until the work emulates a sense of artificial creation. Of Dutch and Singaporean-Chinese heritage, it is her childhood that Paauwe often turns for inspiration in which her photographic series The Painted Mirror reflects. Paauwe’s distinguishable large colour photographs focus on the female form, capturing them at various stages of youth. Her subject choices range from adolescent girls to young women in their late teens and demonstrate the delicate balance of childhood and adulthood. It is within the crevices of childhood recollections and adult complicity that Paauwe situates her oeuvre and within the context of feminist and post-modern feminist theory. Her photographs are built upon reminiscing memories, though not at all times autobiographical but they rather conjure recollections of childhood and hint at the darker side concealed by society’s convention of blissful innocence. Evident in Paauwe’s series Dark Fables, Midnight Gift which features an ambiguous and unsettling image of a girl theatrically spotlighted and adorned in a child-pageant style dress complete with lace and beaded panels. Favouring the austerity of stark black backgrounds and atmospheric effects of more dramatic lighting over Paauwe’s distinct sugary light-suffused images. Primly folded hands and formal attire dramatically contrast against the almost animosity of blackened lips and painted face. This chilling yet beautiful image is reminiscent of the unsolved murder of American child-pageant queen Jon Benet Ramsay. The choices of subject matter are staged in aesthetically pleasing costumes yet the girls are often bound, bruised, grazed and scarred. Paauwe reportedly does not intentionally incorporate these minute details within her work but are purely coincidental but nonetheless enhance her underlying message of innocence as an attribute wrongly associated with children. Paauwe’s keen interest in costuming fuse together flesh and fabric, as evident in her series The Crying Room, a series of ten large square type C photographs, which convey the significant relationship between textiles and the human body to cumulate and become an interface to the social world. This collection of photographs emphasis on the aspect of image styling and highlight the artist’s highly refined visual strategy of youthful, female, headless bodies in contrast with rosy bolts of cloth, objects and skin. The fabric lie with the bodies of the artist’s subjects, the peaks and troughs of the fabric and skin set up a new, capricious world crafted by Paauwe The Crying Room resembles the rather temporal scrambling, aesthetic fixation of fashion photography, notably Paauwe’s closest encounter to this field of photography, it evokes the main principles of fashion photography the desire to blanket reality and manifest a dream like space where the viewers are enveloped in a world of reverence and fantasy. Paauwe’s cites her part-Chinese heritage in her series The Painted Mirror – a culture know for the importance of concealing one’s emotions through blank expressions – through the meticulous and intentional employment of hand-painted mirrors, colourful paper fans, sequins, sheen and symbology of the child beauty pageant as its register, this series of staged portraits peruses the tension between public and private; yet another prevalent Chinese belief of concealment and imperativeness of one’s outer image. The distinctive use of vintage clothing is a testament to Paauwe’s obsession with costuming attributable to her mother’s refusal to keep clothing throughout her childhood. In each of her works, there is a delicate interplay between the choice of costume; notoriously silk and satin flowing gowns stemmed from Paauwe’s past occupation at Steinberg & Tolkien—a famous vintage clothing shop that sourced her with costumes for her work. Paauwe’s digital works are all studios based with minimal digital manipulation; her earlier photographs were all captured in her bedroom utilising common and minimalist objects. The objects utilised relate to fans distributed in church services and the mirrors hint at memories of the simple personal objects her mother carried on their many missionary trips. The sensual coupling of female figures – which becomes overt with the veiled eroticism of the “Double Dutch” series was anticipated in the lusciousness of pink flesh and satin folds of “Tuesday’s Child” is a more confronting series dealing with issues of repression and emancipation. A child, adorned with an adult’s silk-satin nightdress is portrayed wrapped and bound with yellow braids, a symbol associated with a past era – these homely features are rendered ominous through their connotations of domesticity and comfort. The poised hands are conveyed as tethered – bound to obligation and duty—and with childish supplication, which juxtaposes with the flowing coyness of entwined limbs represented in Paauwe’s oeuvre. The coy petting act evident in many of Paauwe’s works suggests a mutual privacy and underlines Paauwe’s intent in capturing sensations of the dichotomy of concealment and exposure. The soft palette of skin tones and elaborate lacy vintage gowns against the black background adds an enhanced sense of theatricality. Conveying varying degrees of implied eroticism can be confused with innocence, a deliberate course of action. In Paauwe’s world of fiction and desire, ambiguity is a prevalent characteristic and issues of femininity, sexuality, power, fantasy and voyeurism pervade Paauwe’s work. Through potent employment of costume, veiling, performance, Paauwe examines the complex relationship between the child, femininity and the camera. Her works which centralise on the limbs, hair and vestments rather than the face are highly suggestive of an artifice and poignant reality, the dichotomy of sexuality and innocence, life and death whilst depicting the natural but haunting transition from childhood to adulthood. |