Venus 8: Flesh & Foam

Venus 8: Flesh & Foam will be exhibiting from 15-29 November 2025 at THS Gallery, Margaret River, WA. Doors open 6.30pm.

Shot across Perth, Western Australia between 2022–2025 and continuing today, the work captures real, behind-the-scenes moments from locker rooms, homes, and the gaze beyond the stage. 

Focusing on sex workers navigating the intersections of gender, visibility, neurodivergence, and culture, Venus 8 offers a quiet counter-narrative to the ways these lives are too often censored or sensationalised. The photographs are shaped through co-authorship with the workers themselves. 

Rejecting the binary lens of glamour, Venus 8 documents quiet, often unseen truths. The small acts of care and shared labour. It invites the viewer to witness the presence, resilience, and agency held within this community.

The series also responds to ongoing censorship of sex workers and artists online. Many images from Venus 8 have been flagged or removed from social platforms, a silencing that echoes broader systemic erasure. Yet the work resists that disappearance, making space for stories told on their own terms.

Venus 8 aims to fracture assumptions and create a dignified, nuanced portrayal of lives often hidden under locker room lights – celebrating complexity, resilience, and humanity far beyond what the world chooses to see. 

The title of this chapter reclaims a myth. Venus, born from seafoam, has long symbolised beauty, allure, and desire — but here, she is made of flesh and skin. Of bruised knees and shared laughter. Of dual identities, labour, and culture.

The name Flesh & Foam also carries a quiet tribute to one of the dancers who inspired the series, whose earlier alias included the word ‘flesh,’ and whose presence helped shape the heart of this work.