Lucy Kumara Moore: Jess Maybury Speaks on Posing Nude and the Female Body
DESIGN & LIVINGSEXNESS
Jess by JoshPhotography by Joshua Gordon
In her latest column, Lucy Kumara Moore quizzes Jess Maybury about her modelling work, nudity and photography
MAY 23, 2019
TEXT
Lucy Kumara Moore
SEXNESS is a new monthly column exploring the shape of 21st-century desire from Lucy Kumara Moore, director of Claire de Rouen bookshop. A drive from the deep, a contested ground, a spur to our true identity, desire is manifold. Without aiming to be comprehensive, SEXNESS interweaves conversations with friends and personal perspective, to generate a PLEASURE-POSITIVE transmission from the cultural now.
For this fourth edition of SEXNESS, I wanted to speak to a beautiful and intelligent woman who I first met at my bookshop,
Claire de Rouen: the model Jess Maybury.
A few years ago, Jess posed in some pictures for her friend, the photographer
Harley Weir. Eventually the images were published as part of Weir’s book
Function (released in 2018), which explores the connections between the female body and desire, biology and reproduction in a series of photographs depicting, for example, clusters of hair on areolas, a pregnant belly, a used condom, a baby’s feet, a woman self-pleasuring and childbirth itself. Weir’s photographs portray the female body as constantly and creatively in flux, shifting from soft to hard, small to large, alluring to nourishing, aroused to exhausted. Like an egg – a symbol of fertility which also appears in the book – the female body has an outer object-ness, but also a hidden, inner, formless aspect; messy and yet miraculous.
Weir’s book reminds me of one of my favourite passages of writing on the nature of desire, from English philosopher Gillian Rose’s book
Love’s Work. Rose writes of her older female friend, Yvette, who has an intelligence and curiosity that make her seem almost supernatural. She is also a mother and grandmother many times over, and extremely lustful, with drawers full of p*rn*gr*ph*c magazines in her flat in New York. Rose notes:
“When I remarked one day… that I couldn’t reconcile her grandmotherly identity with her prodigious sexuality, she looked sadly and wisely at me as the one corrupted by unnatural practices: ‘Have you forgotten the connection between sex and children?’”
For me, this passage is a riposte to the notion that a woman’s sexuality ebbs as she ages or enters motherhood.
Function works in this way, too. I wanted to talk to Jess about her involvement in the project, and our conversation (on a bad phone line that I have since nicknamed Earth-to-Venus) drifted into other interesting realms, too.
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