These photographs clearly distinguish themselves from family or studio images, most particularly for the lack of visibility of the girls’ faces. 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. Laying bare an enigma, the truth of the relations in Paauwe’s images can only be accessed by the viewer’s imagination.

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? Is this a lover’s strategy of designing similarity in order to expose difference or highlight beauty in the flawed details of bitten finger nails, ill-fitting gowns, inaccurately parted hair and stained frocks?

Coils, dots, spirals, wheels and whorls; Paauwe turns the symbolic potential of photography over and over like a lover composing an undeliverable poem. There is no relief for the desire that loops the viewer’s gaze across image after image, no end is offered to the cycling of related ideas. 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.

Excerpt from Twists and turns

Zara Stanhope

former Deputy Director, Senior Curator Heide Museum of Modern Art