The body and all it's interiors. Pushing back against the idolisation of the body as an immutable object to be sanitised and preserved. Not a doll to be put on a shelf and admired. The body - not as a temple - but a playground to be entered, spread, explored. Slippery openings, spit and flesh and hair. Playing in the mess. Limbs merging, breaching the boundaries of the internal. Entering each other, going where you shouldn’t, merging form.
The act of penetration at its core is invasion, sometimes intensely and acutely desired and begged for and sometimes more complex. The sensation is intense and can be entirely changeable depending on the context in which the act takes place. This film is about invading and consuming. The monotonous, sterile mechanics of the fuck machine is hypnotic, the unwavering noise and repetition of movement that’s entirely oblivious to desire or want. It continues to thrust and fuck regardless.
A Botticelli made flesh, two artist’s models in the studio sitting for a painting, laid out in the sun. Marble statues draped in sheets, wetness and warm summer air, gold, green grass on skin, the hum of insects.
To get into the mess and fuck in the wreckage. To give over to pure physical sensation and stare into the void of atrocity, oblivion. The body as machine - like a crashed car - of both powerful possibility and freedom and impotent, crumpled failure. Pain and pleasure heightened by the tension pulling at our own survival instinct.
Our orgies are acts of ritual celebration that against the odds, somehow, still here in the writhing and intertwining of smoke, sweat and bodies.
Sleep is such a vulnerable state, it requires a complete letting go of control. Slipping out of waking consciousness into another world. A world controlled by an unpredictable subconscious that loves to play tricks on you. Watching someone fall asleep is to see them move through different states of being, exposed and unaware.
Porn aesthetics and archetypes are fascinating, sex on film has always been innovative, at the forefront of pushing technology and creativity. Being pushed to the margins means you’re forced to make new rules and create your own visions, processes and traditions. Porn world developed its own visual language, signs and semiotics.
Exploring porn performer Carmina's complex relationship to her Mexican/French heritage saturated in Christian iconography and ideas of purity and what it means to be a “good girl” Her upbringing merged with the culture of her porn community and her bisexuality to explore what it means to exist simultaneously in those spaces, without feeling like you totally fit into any. Shame and sex and freedom and acceptance in the shadow of the history, iconography and symbols that have surrounded her her whole life.
Why do we like to be called Mommy? The archetype of mother looms over us across cultures, it’s powerful and ubiquitous so it’s unsurprising that it can show up in our sexual psyches.
Not fucking but being fucked. Being taken. Taken out of your brain and into your body. Sex that knocks sense out of you for a second. Where you’re weightless and grounded, pinned and stretched. No pleasantries, no thinking just being and doing. Guts, sweat and pumping blood. Giving up and giving in to your body.
Softness and wetness and opening yourself up. About consuming and feeding, being merged and joined. One consuming the other, both folding into each other, temporarily one.
The history of traditional portraiture was about status and branding. With Atrophy Portraits we break down the layers of constructed perfection. These films are an exploration of power and submission, how the boundaries between those roles might initially seem fixed but can be more fluid. What it means to be the subject, to be observed and to meet that gaze. This film is a portrait, designed to be watched on a portrait screen, for example your phone. A portrait needs a frame and our screens are our frames.
The pull of the black square, the luminous screen, both a window and a mirror has been ever more persistent in our consciousness. Increasingly our presence only felt when mediated through a lens or an app or an algorithm, an intermediary of our existence. Creeping derealisation.
The intersection of Femininity and The Grotesque, when femme-ness, glamour, glitter is exaggerated to the point of excess, stomach-turning glistening, gluttonous, grossness. Gorgeous with emphasis on the gorge.
Jealousy is a visceral emotion. Being driven to distraction and loss of control is akin to slipping down the rabbit hole, a descent into hell. Safety morphs into paranoia. Perception of reality becomes unfixed. Full collapse. Desperation can become an intense crucible for obsessive desire.
The Proximity series explores a digital replication of intimacy. The intense closeness of the camera highlights interactions sometimes lost in traditional porn shoots, breath, touches, skin, eye contact.
Flux is the conduit for transference of energy.
The period of time when the sun falls below the horizon line and tears of blue and orange gradiate the sky. I’ve always called this indigo hour but apparently it’s more commonly called blue hour and the Scottish call it the gloaming.
Sex 'fuses' bodies, entering, penetrating, consuming, holding, manipulating physical forms to remove any space left between us, pushing through spacial boundaries to experience an intense and vulnerable closeness and combination. 'Fuse' also references electricity, electrical currents and overload, whereas Carolee Schneemann shot her film Fuses in 1967 on analog 16mm celluloid we make films, fuck and communicate using digital, electronic devices, currents flowing across continents onto screens - now more than ever in the wake of the pandemic. A film made in lockdown isolation that honoured the potential future collaborations missed and explored new ways to fuse and fuck across distances. Bodies projected over and merging, the light from them captured through lenses into binary, transmitted across distances into shimmering pixels on screens thrown in beams of light onto and into another body.
We broadcast our image in cells and pixels across continents, viewed by lenses, pushed through codecs and compression algorithms, adapting new ways to circumvent the physical. Thousands of people every day fuck and fuck themselves broadcast live via webcam. I spent 4 years from 2012-2016 live online, executing a carefully choreographed performance of authenticity - shapeshifting, adapting, morphing. My sex and self monetised for consumption, working for tips. Records of this will outlive me, videos of cam shows ripped, recorded and uploaded on illegal sites, digital time capsules or ticking time bombs. We exist in a system that commodifies our personhood, our images, our data and our lives online, to harness that isn’t freedom from it but it can be control.
