Your Body Is My Canvas

The aesthetics of fetish 𝑓𝑒𝑎𝑡. 𝐸𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑒 𝐿𝑒𝑜𝑛

Jul 13, 2024

The future of art is bodily. Visceral.

When machines can do it all, when we’ve outsourced even the things that nourish us, more of us will finally remember that everything we think and feel is really happening beneath our own skin.

To come to the realisation that transcendence is ultimately an internal process, is to take ourselves back to our origins; that we are more meat than machine, spirits trapped in flesh, Stone Age minds ruled by silicon.

We were made for sensation, ecstasy and sweat.

We were meant to consume each other, not content.

As ULTRA has developed, the work most striking in this new world, the work that exists beyond the boundary of the obvious, commoditised, banal, easily replicated – seems ever more clearly linked with embodiment.

Art that viscerally uses, celebrates, reflects, distorts, takes apart and disembowels our raw humanity. Art that sweats, feels, can be touched, smelled; art that decays, or is born of the body, whether made by human hands or machines.

I’ve written about makers whose practice spans the marks on their bodies, or whose bodies become the art itself.

Lately, I spent some time with a practitioner who most would consider an outsider to the art world. Estelle Leon – dominatrix and fetish artist.

This is not work you will typically find in a gallery; the venue, traditionally, would be a dungeon. But Leon’s work is created in a studio. She works from a gauzy, Lynchian space where human bodies become canvases, pondering the usual fine art questions – how to balance her purist interests with commercial appeal; defining a clear and distinctive voice in a space with deep-rooted conventions; the necessary evils of social media.

What drew me to her work was her aesthetic sensibility, expressed through vivid images of human tableau – suspended men, figures turned into flowers, foreskins twisted by needles into petals.

(I’ll let you find imagery of that last one for yourself.)

Lately, she has been developing High-Concept Kink – complex, visionary scenes of waking dreamspace, where participants can voluntarily enter a crafted world of surveillance, control, surrealism, or the abject… a theatrical kill room of viscerality and body fluids.

These are heightened experiences, concepts that make things like immersive theatre seem utterly insipid.

Reflecting on our conversation, there’s a rich vein of elevated, embodied practice in her work that has informed my thinking. Here are a few of those thoughts, with Estelle’s comments represented like this.

Art? Art is whatever you can get away with

I see BDSM as an inherently creative practice; a rich container for exploration and self-expression. I want to present it that way, by drawing attention to those creative aspects.

Personally, I’ve always seen art as a place for misfits. For people who couldn’t find a natural space in other, more conventional domains, whose exploration makes them hard to include. This often sits ill at ease with the demands of artistic institutions that have to wrangle complex ecosystems of funding pressures, politics, popular taste –

My choice of words is also about censorship.

How so?

So many workers are being taken offline by algorithms picking up keywords. Part of positioning Myself as an artist is to navigate censorship.

There’s a trope that social media is mushing us into identikit personas. I’ve seen countless artist bios and roomsheets that are largely interchangeable.

So there’s a perverse joy in seeing someone define themselves as an artist in part as a forced response; a nudge-wink in the face of social stigma and shadowbanning.

Nonetheless, this is the work of an artist. Considered, crafted, elevated, transformative.

I wouldn’t want to be considered an artist without having sex work tied to that.

Why?

I’m a sex worker first and foremost. That’s important to me. Sex work is devalued in society, the further we distance ourselves from the reality of the sex in sex work, the more socially acceptable it becomes. I am proud of being a sex worker. My work has deeply shaped me. I reject any disconnection of sex work from what I create.

Sex work and art work: two forms of performative labour designed to manufacture affect; to create the desired experiences, to mediate inner journeys towards the things a person might seek, but–

But you are coming into My fantasy. This is how this works. I will take your proclivities into account and respect your hard limits, but this is _My vision_.

Sadomasochism as studio practice

I’ve heard BDSM discussed in terms of spirituality, self-actualisation – and pleasure and intensity of course – but almost never as creative expression.

Leon’s inquiry is grounded in her academic explorations of sexology and gender, both art and science, her interest and pursuit of a romantic ideal; not a reversal of male dominance but a super-expression of femininity.

My practice is an extension of My romantic sensibilities…My idealisation of connection and intimacy. BDSM is a tender and connective practice for me, rather than something that is cold and hard. I love heavy play, but that tenderness still translates, something I try to depict in the imagery. There’s intensity, there's heaviness, but also suppleness and softness.

The subjects of her work are really more… objects of her work. Trussed into bondage, hanging, displayed, skulls garnished with flowers –

With flowers, there’s an obvious femininity to them and part of the way I practise is playing with gender and power but it’s not just reversing the roles and embodying masculine power, but really privileging feminine expression and feminine values and putting them on a pedestal. Looking into the intensity of desire but showing how it can be very sensual and soft and feminine. The brutal romantic.

I’m in mind of Alexander McQueen, his savage beauty. Something elevated and considered, with its own serenity and wry jokes.

A lot of fetish art is very male gaze. In what I display it’s the female gaze; I am the one who has agency and the men in these photos are very objectified. They don’t have a face. They are objects of desire but in a different way – it’s not erotic, it’s sadism... which is… erotic… to me.

The man with a bleeding heart, shot by his powerful creator.

Somatic hacking_the audience

Who is this for?

There is an audience – virtual, online, disparate, who see it all after the fact.

But what of those in the room, the men cocooned in these canvases, the subjects (objects) of these experiences? Are they viewers, participants, collaborators, equals, or just tools in the work?

You’re moulding people. You’re creating rules and defining how you want someone to be and act and feel.

Leon’s practice reminds me of the performance artists I’ve spoken to, where their efforts to define a scene aim to control every movement of their performers, down to the breath, down to the thought…

It’s mental control. Sessions are theatre in some ways, but also somatic hacking. You’re not just creating a theatrical experience, you’re trying to tap into people’s brain chemistry.

Subspace is a physiological experience ~ transient hypofrontality ~ where the blood is drawn away from the prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive functioning… your sense of self, decision-making and memory are all affected. It’s beautiful - people chase that experience… That sense of surrender that is so deeply felt in the mind and the body.

And perhaps there is an artistry in creating that, how to tap into psychology and physicality to bring about that response.

The work exists as static images – for an audience, as advertising, as record, as representation – but its true nature is ephemeral performance.

If you weren’t there, you were never there.

This process of creation is veined with what we hope of any art: to stir us, change us, claw beyond sensation.

So what of the people in the room? Who is the viewer, really?

The audience is both of us. We’re the audience for each other.

Ritual / transcendence

Why is it that sometimes I breeze through a gallery in thirty minutes, my skin barely warm, and other times I’ll sit in front of a single piece for what feels like hours?

At its best, art mediates an experience deep within and beyond myself, as if inspired by its fumes, truly “the waste product of a spiritual practice”.

Ritual elevates otherwise ordinary actions into reverence, much as great skill charges a daub of paint with powerful emotion.

People sometimes tell me that to expect art to carry the weight of transcendence is too heavy a burden. In BDSM, it’s often a central theme.

It’s an experience people are seeking. Connection with the sublime. Even the way people position pro dommes as almost holy... There’s a reverence that people hold.

I’m in mind of other provocateurs… ones more courted by the art world. The gorgeously chaotic human theatre of Young Boy Dancing Group, creating new tribal ritual –