Vex Ashley is the orchestrator and mind behind A Four Chambered Heart.
Based in the UK, she is the director, producer, and performer within the pornographic and artisanal universes she concocts.
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.
We record, broadcast and replicate our images on an unprecedented scale. Observing and seeing.
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.
Our bodies are conduits, sex is transference of energy. Eyes, mouths and orifices become blackholes against glittering skin, fluids dark against phosphorescence. Reflecting each other. Elemental fusion.
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.
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.
The history of traditional portraiture is about status and branding. With this portrait we were interested in breaking down those layers of constructed perfection. Initially in renaissance portrait painting, women are often pictured in a profile view, detached and passive. This painting was one of the first to have the female subject confronting the viewer, meeting your eyes without appeasing or smiling. There are parallels in the expressions in this film and in the painting.
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.
This is an exploration of screens and how they translate the visceral flesh of sex and bodies and what that now means today in an age of digital pornography. In short, fuck being reduced to 'muse' - in art, in porn, in life, whatever.
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.
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.
Treating bodies like botany, in intense, investigative close up, scientifically graphic, reveals them at their most intimate but also maybe their most anonymous and dissociated.
The act of giving up control; devotion and subjugation. Dual states of purity and sin. The ritual of transcendence. The undertones of tension that are imbued in repression and reverence.
The process of turning base material into gold, the philosophers stone. A metaphor for the way certain acts and bodily materials are treated as obscene and base and how powerfully transcendent they can be transforming them into elixir, into gold, something precious.
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.