Paula Mahoney

Dis/Appear II is a lament for the artist’s mother who died in 1983 and remains faceless in the artist’s memory. Mahoney’s mother was a homemaker and a hobbyist fashion designer who designed and made nearly all her clothes and those of her children. In this project, Mahoney is asking questions, such as, how do you revisit the image of a person that you knew so intimately when you don’t remember their face? Mahoney uses her mother’s clothes and photographs herself and her female family members dressed in these clothes in an attempt to locate her mother’s image.

Using photography as a way to unravel memory, and in this case, give physicality to the gaps in memory. With the desert acting both as a metaphor for death and as a place of comfort and refuge, visually operating as an extension of her mother’s body, a place that as a child, one is folded into, flesh into flesh. The images were taken travelling to and fro and during Mahoney's residency at Watch This Space in Alice Springs.