Vex Ashley

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As A Porn Director, I Find the Beauty in the Gross Parts of Sex
Porn performer and director Vex Ashley of Four Chambers makes high-concept, artistic adult films. In doing so, she's learned the importance of staying true to her creative vision—and always being the first person to get naked on set.
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My First Time is a column and podcast series exploring sexuality, gender, and kink with the wide-eyed curiosity of a virgin. We all know your "first time" is about a lot more than just popping your cherry. From experimenting with kink to just trying something new and wild, everyone experiences thousands of first times in the bedroom—that's how sex stays fun, right?
This week we're talking to porn performer and director Vex Ashley of Four Chambers about her experiences in the industry. You can catch My First Time on Google Podcasts , Apple Podcasts , Acast or wherever you get your podcasts.
My generation was the first to grow up existing on social media and the internet, and I remember going online and having very basic cyber-sex with people when I was at school. I’d also read erotic fan fiction online a lot, and go on chat rooms and sext people.
I was lucky because my parents were very open about sex with me: I remember asking my mum what masturbation was, and she drew me a picture of the vulva and the clitoris. It wasn’t a massive surprise to them when I started doing sex work, because I was always someone who’d had open and frank conversations with them about sex.
When I went to art school I started using my body in my artwork, taking photographs of myself in the nude and using my body as a sculptural form. I became interested in the idea of getting naked on the internet from a creative sense, so I started taking pictures for an alternative website. Some girls who worked there did webcamming , so I started doing that and really enjoyed it too. I became exposed to a community of people who were doing porn and sex work.
What I saw was there weren’t many people who were using porn as a creative medium for ideas. My boyfriend and I started making porn music videos; we’d take a piece of music and shoot some naked, writhing bodies, cut it to the music, and upload it onto sites like Tumblr. The response that we were getting from that was really incredible, so we decided to see if we could shoot real porn in that style.
It all started as a bit of an experiment, but then five years later, here I am. My partner and I had [initially] made a video that was of just me, and we’d got this macro lens on the camera. We were interested by the fact that most porn is shot from the middle distance in this very clinical way, and we wanted to see what porn would look like if the camera was uncomfortably close—so we shot a solo video of just me, where the camera is really tight on me.
We thought it would be cool to shoot with another person, and I’d met someone online who I’d been chatting with so we decided that he would be the right person for the job. I hadn’t actually performed with anyone else ever at that point, or had sex with anyone else outside of my relationship with my boyfriend.
The shoot turned out to be more difficult for my boyfriend than we’d been expecting. When we were filming, I was just super-focused on doing the best job I could. As soon as we finished, I realized that my partner looked really upset. Just the reality of watching me have sex with someone else had hit them harder than what they’d necessarily prepared for. We had to do all this extra work on us and our relationship and unpick what me doing porn really meant for us. What’s really fascinating about human emotions is that you can think logically that you’ll be okay with something, but when it comes down to it, your visceral gut reaction can surprise you.
You know how the first time you do drugs it’s the best time? Well, the first time I did porn was the best time. It was so novel and I really forgot about the camera. Every time since, I’ve been more in my head about it, or I’m thinking about what my partner’s doing, or how the scene looks.
When I’m directing porn films for my project Four Chambers, what I’m really interested in is playing with the aesthetics of porn and sex and seeing how we can use sexuality to talk about other things in a more conceptual way. I love anything that’s fucking weird, like liquids or pouring stuff on people. I’ve done shoots with eggs and fish. For me, porn is more interesting when it’s a little gross. Sex is half transcendent, and half dirty and a bit disgusting. It isn’t hot unless it’s a bit disgusting!
What I try to do with Four Chambers is capture a sense of the atmosphere of sex, rather than the graphic explicitness of it. What I’m interested by is: how can you communicate that build up of intensity, so that you’re not just seeing everything at once and having that instant gratification?
Being a director and a performer is really important to me. I feel like if you’re profiting off other people’s sexual labor, you should be putting yourself in the same situation so that you can really understand the politics of it and how that feels. If I’m directing a scene and performing, I’ll set the tone by being the first person naked or the first person to do the thing that’s a bit difficult or weird, because it shows I’m willing to do anything I’d expect someone else to do.
One of the best experiences I’ve had on set was after the Berlin Porn Festival. We were going to shoot a scene after the end of the festival, and it was the morning after the closing party. I woke up and felt like, I can't be bothered to shoot today . But then we were filming and all of a sudden there was this intense energy on set. For the climax of the scene, one of the performers had these intense, earth-shattering orgasms where she was shaking and crying as we were all holding her and kissing her face. It felt like this incredibly magic, transcendent experience where we were all in the moment. I remember walking away from that feeling so invigorated by my love for shooting porn and making content and sex in general.
One thing I’ve learned from porn is how to communicate and talk about sex. On a porn set, you’ll turn up and have a conversation with someone about exactly how you’re going to have sex, which is something that rarely happens in day-to-day heteronormative society.
People think porn is this disposable, throwaway thing, and they don’t value porn performers as creatives or laborers. There’s this idea that all porn performers are is what they can do sexually, but as a job it’s much more nuanced than that.
There’s a mystique around being a porn performer, but the reality is that there’s a lot of waiting around, you probably don’t even get to fuck until the end of the day, you’re going to be tired, there’s going to be paperwork to sign. When I’m editing my films, I’m sitting around in my pyjamas for 12 hours a day while my cats mill around me. It’s not glamorous.
Since SESTA-FOSTA was passed , there’s been a huge cleaning of house and it’s become much harder for sex workers to exist online. The legislation [that makes internet service providers responsible for everything that’s published on their sites] has pushed sex workers into the shadows. I was funding my project on a website called Patreon, and within 24 hours I lost all my income. Now I have to figure out how I’m going to fund Four Chambers from the ground up again. In the last two years, everything’s become more conservative, and it’s so much harder for marginalized communities to exist online.
We criticize porn for not being diverse and having different perspectives and voices. But when there are avenues for independent work, we shut them down, so we just end up with the same repetitive porn again and again. We need to make it more possible for new voices and creatives to come through.
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Vex Ashley is challenging the good old boys' adult film business model—and coming out on top.
By Olivia Fleming Published: Jan 19, 2015
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On any given morning, 6,000 people from around the world turn on their computers to watch Vex Ashley , a 25-year-old cam girl and an independent pornographer from Leeds, take her clothes off.
Fair skinned with long, lilac hair and an affinity for winged eyeliner and delicate jewelry, it's easy to see why Ashley (a pseudonym created when she first started undressing on the internet) is often labeled a "tasteful" porn star. Her fledgling erotica studio and artist co-op, Four Chambers , which combines sex and cinema to make highly-stylized porn shorts on a crowdfunded donation basis, tackles sexuality with an eye for aesthetics not often found in mainstream porn. Still, "tasteful porn" is not a trademark with which Ashley, a fine arts graduate, necessarily wants to be associated.
"I understand that it comes from a place of wanting to put the kind of thing I'm doing in a space that feels more comfortable," she says, explaining that "camming" is as much about adult entertainment as it is playing a role of sexual health coach, "but I find the argument of putting someone's personal choice down in order to lift somebody else's up, a difficult one. I think there's room in porn for all different kinds of sexual expression. The idea that the porn I make is tasteful and, therefore acceptable, means that there is also an unacceptable and 'wrong' [version of porn] and that is not a helpful argument to make."
"What is currently available on porn sites is made for one kind of viewer—the only viewer that producers think will make them a profit: hetero white guys," she says. "It means that people feel their sexuailty is not represented in porn, and, because these ideal consumers in the eyes of the porn producers have so much content to access, the filmmakers start to one-up each other…There's gotta be more dicks, more holes. And as an outsider, someone who has never engaged with that, it can be quite overwhelming and can seem very othering."
Rather than making traditional porn, Ashley decided to forgo turning a profit from Four Chambers (she makes enough from camming to cover her own living costs, she says) and instead relies on pre-order donations from supporters which allows her to make "weird stuff, experimental stuff, and to work with who I want."
"I'd like to think there's more to experience in our videos than the sex," she says, noting that over half of her viewers identify as female. Indeed, one of her recent short films, titled Proximity II , highlights the intricacies and minutiae of sex (breath, sweat, touches). A mirage of close-up shots means the video becomes more about atmosphere and experience, and less about clarity…or, simply, fucking.
Ashley started Four Chambers after a period of working on nude art stills, which led to an opportunity to experiment with moving image. "It's about not being afraid of being graphically sexual while focusing on things that I find interesting in films such as concept and aesthetics," she explains. 
Each of Ashley's videos is co-owned by everyone involved, yet another reaction to unsavory and capitalistic aspects of the sex industry. "Any idea that you have of exploitation in the porn industry, of profiting off someone else's sexual labor, it all goes back to the idea of making content 'seen' to make a profit. I was really keen to make things for the love of it," she says. To partially subsidize costs, Ashley turned to crowdfunding, which she sees as an effective way to keep independent people in business, to diversify the kind of people who are able to produce artwork, and to keep creative people creating. So far, she says, the response to the campaign has been overwhelming: Four Chambers takes in roughly $3,000 in donations for every video project.
Having grown up with "really liberal, hippy '70s parents," Ashley says she feels both fortunate and empowered to have such an "incredible support" network, including her partner of six years, a close group of girlfriends, and two silver tabby cats who keep her company during long hours of film editing. She suspects that if the stigma of working in the sex industry was lessened for others, consumers of porn would have much more to look forward to. "We would end up in a situation where more people would make porn, or creative depictions of sexual expression, for themselves; they would be able to experiment, like people do in music and in filmmaking to a certain extent," she says "All of that work can exist: We can still have the huge gang bangs, the stuff people see as the more extreme side of it, but if the market were more diverse, it wouldn't seem like that was all that existed."
Ashley, who began camming in 2012 after seeing that girls weren't required to be "faceless genitals," relishes being able to play off her own personality in her work. Though she acknowledges that it would be "incredible" to have greater diversity "of the types of people and bodies that are cast" in porn today, she believes that the industry, which has taken a huge hit in recent years in terms of sales and funding for production, will eventually be forced to defer to independent porn creators, anyway. According to Steven Hirsch, founder of Vivid, one of America's largest porn studios—and home of the notorious Kim Kardashian sex tape—the industry has seen an 80 percent reduction in DVD sales over the past five years. With sites like clips4sale.com, where people can create, upload, and sell content directly, the industry is seeing a decentralization of porn production, allowing for more independence and creative freedom, as well as more personal content.
"There is a silent movement of people who are making their own porn in their bedrooms. Now that we all have cameras, and even iPhones that can shoot high quality video, it has become so much cheaper," she says. "People are taking porn into their own hands, and that is only going to improve the kind of porn we're seeing and make it more representative of the breadth of human sexual experience."
Olivia Fleming is the former Features Director at HarpersBAZAAR.com . Born in New Zealand, Olivia was raised with two basic beliefs: That deep respect for the earth is a given, and women are imperative to leading a successful, progressive country (two female prime ministers took office during her childhood). But after moving to New York in 2008, she quickly realized that her status quo was at odds with the rest of the world. In an effort to change that—and to legitimize women's duel interest in fashion, politics, and human rights—Olivia focuses on female storytelling. From long-form features and ambitious packages, to new podcast initiatives that elevate the magazine's content mix across platforms, she champions the stories no-one else is telling.
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The line between art and pornography has long been a contentious issue within the creative community — with pornography at times be overlooked, swept under the proverbial carpet, in favour of more cultured artistic pursuits. However, for independent porn producer and performer Vex Ashley, pornography is a beautiful and highly creative source of inspiration for her work. A medium that has merits in itself. With her Four Chambers project, she has created a series of independent, conceptual and creative films that touch on a deep reservoir of cultivated culture, from psychoanalytic concepts to the experimental visual art of Carolee Schneemann. Vex Ashley’s aims are bold and ambitious, attempting to reclaim significance for pornography and decentralise the entire process, taking back power from the traditional practices of the pornographic industry as a whole. No longer are the films solely produced by a single demographic, but through her Four Chambers project, a new perspective has been unleashed, pushing the boundaries of what porn is really capable of showing and articulating. With a background in analogue photography, digital sex and art school, this coalescence of stimulating fields has resulted in Vex Ashley creating a truly unique viewing experience that encapsulates many positive points of the avant-garde and DIY culture. GATA took the time to talk to this ambitious creative force, in an attempt to understand the roots of this project, and the various visual references and energies that are expressed in her work. 









“ Sex is fascinating because it’s simultaneously an object of cultural fascination and disfunction. There are very few areas of making art that still feel like they have somewhat unexplored territory, sex is maybe one of them? ”

— VEX ashley








“ Sex and eroticism to me is magic, it has the ability to tap into the deepest, most base and primal parts of our psyche and also simulatenously connect us to something that sometimes feels almost transcendent and divine. ”

— Vex AShley








“ We wanted to keep the project and the films deliberately ambiguous to allow the viewer not to become trapped looking for what they already know they want to see, hopefully, that means they go into our films curious for new experiences. I am a woman who makes porn but I’m not just making “porn for women” ”

— Vex AShley








“ My artwork often centred and featured my own body as a site of visceral exploration, influenced by artists like Carolee Schneemann, Ana Mendieta, Helen Chadwick and Francesca Woodman who all used their physicality, their naked body and their sexuality as vehicles to create. ”

— vex ashley



Art , Cinema GATA Magazine 30 November 2021


Photography GATA Magazine 28 November 2021

Hi GATA, I’m Vex, I’m a visual artist, director, performer and independent porn creator with my DIY porn project called Four Chambers. 
I always wanted to create; my artwork often centred and featured my own body as a site of visceral exploration, influenced by artists like Carolee Schneemann, Ana Mendieta, Helen Chadwick and Francesca Woodman who all used their physicality, their naked body and their sexuality as vehicles to create.
I started exploring sex work online as both a way to pay my way through university and as a way to push
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