A surfeit of the feminine suffuses Deborah Paauwe's colour-saturated world, in which an exploration of female identity and burgeoning sexual awareness is intensified through a layering of feminine signifiers - a lush cascade of hair, a glimmer of gold brocade, a length of ribbon. The sense of mystery fundamental to Paauwe's ambiguous negotiation of the sometimes edgy, transitional terrain between girlhood and adulthood is predicated on the single suspended frame, the frozen photographic moment, the lack of any elucidatory past or future narrative.
Neither cropped nor digitally manipulated, the filmic, highly directed quality of Paauwe's photographic images has been consistently noted. With the large-scale video projection of this most recent work, Paauwe for the first time animates her tableaux, as the anonymous young girls of Beautiful Games enact adolescent rituals of dressing up, grooming and dancing - interactions which pave the way for an understanding of the private and public realms of intimacy. (Wendy Walker, August 2003)

Centre for Contemporary Photography
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