Ritual, Adornment and Ornamental Intimacy
Adorned with ribbon - Original work by Jonny Anthony
Watercolour on paper
She presents herself deliberately, aware of the viewer and unashamed of that awareness. There is an exhibitionist quality to the image, but it does not read as performance for approval. It reads as offering. The body is not passive here. It is arranged, adorned, and held with care, as though part of a private ceremony that the viewer has been allowed to witness.
The work draws on staple play, a form of kink that sits within the wider landscape of BDSM practices often described as edge play. Within kink communities, edge play refers to consensual activities that involve heightened sensation, risk, or psychological intensity. These practices are approached through negotiation, trust, and informed consent rather than recklessness. While staple play itself is not widely documented in academic literature, it exists within this framework of risk aware consensual kink, where meaning is shaped through choice and bodily autonomy.
Staple play can appear confronting because it borrows tools associated with medical environments, spaces that many people associate with vulnerability, fear, or loss of control. In kink contexts, that association is intentionally reworked. The clinical object is removed from its original purpose and reimagined as something intimate and personal. What matters is not the tool itself, but the decision to place it on the body as ornament rather than treatment.
In this painting, the staples act as points of connection rather than focal points. The eye is drawn instead to the red ribbon, laced carefully into a corset pattern across her labia. Corsetry has long been part of how femininity is shaped and displayed, both publicly and privately. It carries histories of discipline, beauty, restriction, and desire. By echoing that language in such an intimate location, the work collapses the divide between what is meant to be seen and what is meant to be hidden.
The corset pattern becomes an act of presentation. It suggests the slow intimacy of unlacing, the anticipation of reveal, the knowledge that what lies beneath is chosen rather than taken. This is not about exposing the body for shock. It is about framing the body as something precious, intentional, and worthy of adornment.
Pain is not centred in this image. Instead, the focus rests on pattern, control, and aesthetic clarity. For some, staple play involves sensation. For others, it is about surrender, precision, or the emotional weight of offering the body in this way. The work leaves space for those differences. The ribbon can read as restraint, decoration, care, or devotion, depending on the viewer’s own relationship to kink and femininity.
What interests me most is how practices like this allow people to reclaim narratives placed on their bodies. Medical tools lose their authority. Fear softens into intimacy. Femininity is no longer fragile or decorative alone, but deliberate and owned. Submission, when chosen, becomes an expression of agency rather than its absence.
This painting exists in support of sexual expression, kink, and fetish as valid and meaningful parts of human experience. It treats these practices not as extremes to be explained away, but as personal languages that deserve care and beauty.
This work continues my NSFW practice exploring bodily ownership, ornamentation, and the ways people choose to inhabit desire. I am interested in moments where discomfort and beauty coexist without cancelling each other out.
Commissions are open. I am drawn to subjects who understand their sexuality as something intentional, layered, and worthy of being rendered with respect.
