Paula Mahoney

Reanimation is a series of self-portraits, that illustrate the bringing together in the frame of the abject and the self. These photographs are interested in the intersection of death and life and revisiting the time of lamentation. This time, when the mourner acknowledges their mortality, is also an in-between time, an ambiguous time where the presence of death is heightened, and separation is difficult. The portraits are a call to my father’s spirit, via a reanimation of his suit. In these self-portraits, I dress my body in a black bodysuit, so I am totally covered, and my identity is undefined. I, too, am in an ambiguous space, as my face is covered, it is difficult to breathe with the zip completely closed, and I cannot see through the fabric. I recognise in the resulting photographs the eroticism of the black bodysuit that resembles a gimp suit. Not only that, but I am sexually contained, with my body female but shapeless, and I wear my dad’s suit reversed. The breakdown of the binaries of subject and object, female and male, and my father and I are present.