Deborah paauwe biography

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Their body shape, hair colour, signature of movement and gesture, are remarkably similar, almost familial. Yet, there is an ambiguousness to the figures. Age is indecipherable at first glance. Both are lean and long-limbed, in a youthful way. They cling together in their matching Sunday best, tightly framed and cropped against cold grey.

With time, more details come to light. Disparities between the pair become more evident. Bruises become decipherable, as do veins, the deep scarring on a leg. We come to realise that one subject to be a woman and the other a child. Their touch becomes one of nurture, one of connection via mutual experience. It is not necessarily one of choice.

Though separated by time, their shared memory ensnares and entraps them both. The Yellow Line is a parable not of boundless freedoms, but perhaps of our inability to break from our past. Dan Rule. Dan Rule is an arts and music writer from Melbourne. He writes the 'Around the galleries' column in The Age and is the co-founded of independent art publishing imprints And Collective and Erm Books.

Do you own a collection of love letters or cards — a surprise bundle which you unearth now and again when moving house or spring cleaning? No matter how many years or decades go by, there are certain notes which have retained their original resonance, even if tainted by subsequent events. It takes more will than we have been able to muster to completely sever these memories or bonds of personal deborah paauwe biography, imbued as they are with hopeful desires and impetuous behaviour.

Such traces of love or lust are not yet ready for the recycling bin. No matter the freshness of the feelings once pressed into the service of a relationship, those sentiments had always been said by others before and would be conveyed by us again. On the other hand, her images are also suffused with symbolic power, that of photography, and the representational and associative possibilities of her medium and subject matter across time.

Like a lover, Paauwe understands the pull of love and yearnings of the flesh. She explores the effectiveness of her medium as an organic substance, a surface producing images of beauty, sentiment, metaphor and other universal values. By conjuring other bodies with her photography Paauwe presses us to question our relationships with these others she controls, and to ask just what the artist is proposing here?

Across the twentieth century, photographers have tested questions of how the truth and goodness of images can be called to account. Paauwe extends this tradition of image-making. Confining her sitters to children and young adults enables a boundary to be drawn around a subject, limiting the zone in which she will tighten the screws. The strategy is then to survey and zoom in on her subjects.

Deborah paauwe biography: Deborah Paauwe (b. ),

Shot from above, the viewer seems to take the role of a microscope lens, pressing down on its specimen. Any personal or womanly differentiation is minimised, drained by the colouration of the light and surrounding whorls of closely toned cotton and chiffon. Even the freshness of youth is masked in this way, only bared necks or vulnerable female backs are exposed to view.

The sense of strangeness is heightened by the dresses, which evoke another, earlier decade, appearing incongruous on the frame of a young girl whose body does not give off the excitement of dressing up and childishly play acting for the camera. The catatonic stillness and repeated, decisive moments of the Carousel series are clearly an artifice, but a deliberately elusive play act on the part of the artist.

Are the downcast and hair-covered faces to suggest modesty, or euphoria?

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Coils, dots, spirals, wheels and whorls; Paauwe turns the symbolic potential of photography over and over like a lover composing an undeliverable poem. Her romance with flesh and feelings is a fascination shared historically with artists from Inges to Matisse, and remains a compulsion with her contemporaries such as Kiki Smith. Photographs both mark and connect points across time, memorialising others and reinvigorating feelings held in suspension, like remembering a face recalled by a long forgotten valentine.

Love and mourning, life and loss: both circulate through images and texts. Such connectivity is also to be found in the myths and theories that explain humanity and provide our understanding of nature, as well as being absorbed into academic disciplines from psychoanalysis to economics when birth is described as part of death, beauty found in ugliness, consistency reliant on instability, the void part of wholeness… Similarly we find contemporary and intertwined sensations, such as that of the unspoilt and the violated, the demur and despoiled, responses that circulate in our viewing of the Carousel images.

With compositions reminiscent of the centralised orb of an eye, the images of Carousel uncannily look back at us. Their permanent stare is a reminder not only of the endurance of the print but also the archiving power of the mind, with its often capricious recall of past infatuations and adored ones. Paauwe pours over the interlinked topology of reality, image and memory, and invites the magic of transubstantiation from material facts to unconscious emotions.

She helps us see that the camera cannot compare to the godlike eye, even though photography is less and less forgiving of human imperfections. Zara Stanhope. Deputy Director, Senior Curator. Heide Museum of Modern Art. Deborah Paauwe's recent photography draws together flesh and fabric. It is at this deborah paauwe biography that the significant relationship between textiles and the human body becomes an interface to the social world.

This new collection of images continues the artist's highly refined visual strategy of young, female, headless bodies in contrast with cloth, objects and other skin. However, this time there is more of an emphasis on image styling. In The Crying Room the arrangement of carefully selected components raise purple, peach, green, pink and red tulle, velvet and chiffon to a key position along side the human elements of Paauwe's images.

The peaks and troughs of net and pile are a soft but tangible landscape setting for a new, capricious, world created by Paauwe.

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In light of this, The Crying Room — a series of ten large square type C photographs — resembles another genre of image making driven by temporal scrambling, image fetishism and the drive for desire and illusion: fashion photography. This series skates along the rim of fashion imagery more than any of her previous bodies of work.

Indeed, The Crying Room might be said to evoke fashion photography's key principles, where the powers of seduction lie in an ability to veil the real and create a dream space where viewers lose themselves in fantasy and reverie. Photographer Richard Avedon once described his role at Vogue as 'selling dreams, not clothes'. Fashion advertising is not concerned with cataloguing the everyday or with facts, instead, it "hides the origins of things.

However, they have a similar sexual agency. Equally, Silent Sleeping Beauty rests like a corpse, restrained and almost mummified by her Victorian dress. While in the narrative pair, Restless Sleeping Beauty pictures a girl waking from her solitary dreams, not to the kiss of Prince Charming but to her own self-made pleasures. Child sexuality in these images is just one more mask for us to consume — newness and youth, innocence and nubility function as inviolable attractions to acts of violation.

Paauwe wants us to look and she seeks to make the experience as pleasurable for us as possible. The repertoire of poses used are a mix of coyness and availability, awkwardness and knowingness, exposure and concealment.

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Like most pedophiliac representations — where the subject is represented through the desires of the camera-wielding adult — the child is made to adopt a deliberately inflexible, artificially aesthetic posture. The placement of herself in the photographs too, means that whatever is tellable about the treatment or presentation of these models must also be true for Paauwe.

So while these photographed bodies take on, in a formal sense, the eternal quality of ancient Greek sculpture and are rigid, headless, handless, fragmentary beauties, they are also child goddesses. Paauwe continually questions whether or not we can appreciate innocence now without bringing cynicism to bare on our ideas about what childhood represents.

In light of such cases as the JonBenet Ramsey and James Bulger murders — where children are not just the victims but also the perpetrators of malicious crimes — this may be even harder. The notorious evil-child roles in films such as The Exorcist and The Omen remind us that popular culture has long envisioned children as the faces of innocence behind absolute terror.

Paauwe explores her Chinese-Dutch heritage, performing the role of an exotic temptress in works such as Bed Time Story and Brush Stroke