We have a new artist on XConfessions!
Introducing Eve Jones!
“Writing takes all day
It takes all your life”
Jones is a designer, photographer, and writer from Toronto. She likes tall men and wayward girls, 24 hour anything and cream in her coffee. And she is the latest artist to join the Lust family on XConfessions! With a beautifully calming and muted colour palette, combined with intimate sexual portraits, Jones plays with a dichotomy of pleasure and pain; beauty and cruelty; sexuality and intimacy that leaves you curious, and aroused 
“When I was young, I had a book called ‘ The Art of Being Girl. ‘ Written for the kind of girls who live on milk and fulfilled expectations, girls who walked in bright forests with little birds for company. But I wasn’t that kind of girl. I was the kind of girl who wanted blood in her kisses.”
Keep reading below for my interview with her and some insights into her wonderful mind!
Can you tell me a bit about how and when you started working in this style?
I started taking photos in high school photography, but didn’t really notice I was doing it until about five years ago. I did a lot street photography, I still love shooting architecture and crowds, but about two years ago I started creating images based on my own experiences as I explored and processed my relationships with sexual desire, romance, and pain – the way they can change me, the way they make me different or the same as other people, how I can be a more authentic person… There was a need to make something for myself out of these experiences and questions, to make something that looks and feels the way I do, and Photography is one of the ways I am doing that.
What led you to create your photographic series “Oyster”?
I made ‘Oyster’ with my ex-husband shortly after leaving him, and while it was a difficult time, it allowed me to live more authentically, and more happily. In one way or another a lot of my work is about the act of transformation, and the tension and contradiction between pain and beauty. In making ‘Oyster’, and it’s more peaceful sister ‘Seafoam’, I leaned into the metaphor of the pearl as something beautiful that comes from trauma and a very internal, invisible, conflict.
It was important to me that the series have the kind of penetration and pull that it does, there was a need for that to be real, happening, not just implied or suggested. The most important aspect of ‘Oyster’ for me was how much I loved making it. I had been sort of tiptoeing around explicit work for a while, and Oyster was my first conscious embracing of sex and real pleasure as subject matter in a photograph. Embracing that had a huge impact on the work I have done since, and the work I hope to do moving forward.
What made you want to collaborate with XConfessions?
The work of XConfessions and the amazing collaborators here feels very personal and beautiful and inspiring while also filling a need for creative diversity in an area that means a lot to me. Porn often excludes my perspective of sex or BDSM or submission in favour of things with less subtlety, but in the work and goals of XConfessions there is an honesty and craft that makes it an honour to be included.
I feel like much of your work involves pain and delicacy simultaneously. How do you achieve that?
Part of it is the colour palette. When I first started creating these highly sexualized images I was surprised at the colour palettes I was choosing, but they accomplish my aim very well. The soft gentle colours create a sense of safety and warmth, working to subtly obscure the implied violence, pain, or struggle for change.
When I first started exploring submission and pain it was the mental aspects of the sensations and experiences that drew me almost as much as the sensations themselves. I have strong masochistic tendencies, and a deep curiosity about the apparent contradictions of my desires and the tangled knot of mind and body, memory and narrative and sensation, that creates meaningful sex. Some of my most agonizing experiences as a masochist have led to the most tender moments of my life. Expressing moments of pain or risk or change in warm tones with a focus on fine soft details is a way I can express and explore the truth of my experience.
What’s the story behind that idea of death that reoccurs in your work?
It exists very much as an aspect of the exploration of contradiction I mentioned earlier. Death as an opposing force to how vividly alive pain can make me feel, death as a shade of fear, an edge to violence. It is also just such a big lovely dark metaphor for how life can change in a moment, and part of how I am documenting and exploring masochism in my images is about finding ways to talk about death and fear love and show how they have the power to alter you, sometimes in really beautiful ways.
What’s in the future for your work?
I have so many things I want to create so I am always finding ways to maximize my time working. I have an essay coming out in a great book by Fiction & Feeling called “Split” in March, and a collection of short Erotic fiction on Amazon in May. My site, Eveunleashed.com is always growing with new work either fiction or images. I have two sets waiting for some editing to launch in the next month or so.
If you could describe yourself in one image, what would that be?
Did you ever find a good visual representation of an orgasm? If so, can you share it with us?
The post Pearls, Oysters and Ropes: Introducing Artist Eve Jones! appeared first on ErikaLust.