11 Jun 2025 2 min read

Pornography Absentia

Lingerie. Copper. Absence. A shrine shaped like an orifice. Domestic matter rethreaded. 2022

The Set Is the Spell

Roy Stuart taught me something I didn’t expect: that pornography has an architecture.

In one of his surreal, theatrical shoots, a woman in chainmail lingerie arches toward a bearded man in a basketball tank top. But what caught me wasn’t their bodies—it was the wound-like wire sculpture curling above them. A prop? A neural map? Or an altar?

It looked uncannily like something I’d just constructed in my own studio.

A tangle of red ceiling netting suspended above a domestic space. A remnant from a past installation, left in place. It evokes tension, ritual, and erotic memory—but no event. The scene never came. — *Leftover netting.* *It holds the memory of a scene that never happened.*

Pornography in Absentia

What I make isn’t erotic photography. What I make is the container. The charge. The premonition.

I work with netting, lace, laundry hampers, copper scrubbers, forgotten underwear. These objects have touched the body—but now they hang in waiting. Not to be worn again. Not to be entered. But to mark where something might have happened. And didn’t.

Or maybe it did, and the scene never resolved. Or maybe I’m the only one who remembers.

Ars Erotica Domesticata

The objects in these images are not costumes. They are architectural residues of intimacy—charged, sorted, and suspended.

They live in tension. They are not props. They are spells.

My ceiling netting doesn’t light the room. It haunts it. The lace bundles do not hide. They vibrate.

The large-scale webbed installation? It is not meant to be walked through. It’s meant to ask: "Are you watching for someone who’s not coming?"

Roy Stuart image. Woman in chainmail lingerie poses with man in athletic wear, in front of wired sculptural backdrop. Erotic tableau. Used for visual reference and contrast. — *What he cast as climax, I built as residue.* *Wired women. Ghost altars. We were never trying to match.*

A shrine-like installation made from pink netting, black lace underwear, and suspended domestic textiles. No figure is present. The structure resembles an erotic web, layered and ceremonial. — *Built from what’s worn, washed, abandoned.* *Hung into witness.*

The Architect of the Un-scene

I don’t pose in these. I install them. I offer the trappings, not the transaction. This isn’t an invitation to fuck. It’s a map of what you missed.

Eroticism doesn’t live in climax. It lives in what’s charged—and deliberately unfinished.

This is pornography in absentia. I am the architect of the un-scene.

A soft-focus installation detail, showing pink netting, wire, and lingerie silhouetted against a warm light. No figure is present. The scene is layered, veiled, and ambiguous. — *No body behind the veil. Just the memory of an invitation that never came*

References & Citations
Image: Roy Stuart, circa early 2000s.
Appears in this dispatch for visual reference and critical contrast.
All other images and installations © Esme Providence Brown.