Vex Ashley

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.

An exploration in narcissistic desire, a kind of autoeroticopsis in being the subject of desire for yourself.

Set in the 1600s, a group of women are filled with an uncontrollable desire to run, touch, and tear themselves apart

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.

You're getting fucked without even knowing. Fucked behind your back. Fucked in the shadow of your absence.

There's something so special about adult films pre internet digitization, VHS tapes copied and circulated in your community, mailing lists and screening parties and brown paper bags were the distribution model. The intimate privacy of a time capsule contained in a black plastic film cartridge, hidden in the back of a drawer, labelled as something inconspicuous so as not to arouse suspicion - hidden treasure.

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.

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.

Folk Horror as a film genre explores the power of ritual, stories passed down through generations and long forgotten. Taking sanitised modern life and peeling back the mask to expose the dirt, the earth, our connection to the old ways. Exploring the darkness in the woods, the power of the land, the earth and it’s strangeness, everything about our landscape and existence that’s remains unsettling and unknown.

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.