Layla Sailor

After completing a degree in photography at Manchester Met- ropolitan University in 2005, Sailor continued to combine commercial fashion photography with ﬁne art and ﬁlm, receiving plaudits at the IPA Awards and the Berlin Fashion Film Festival. Sailor was awarded the Grand Prize for Art Takes Paris in 2013.

Delores

"Since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human... they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass- produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.”

Naomi Wolf The Beauty Myth (1990)

This project was inspired by my experience of living and working in Ningbo, China and my observations on hidden sexuality, patriarchy and isolation in contemporary Chinese culture. Dolores was purchased from a vending machine, squashed into a plastic bag with her foot driven into her own face, a comedic and grotesque object of seduction. Through ﬁlming, cutting, collaging and deflating, these pieces explore the projection of human personalities, needs and desires onto a synthetic subject. By de—objectifying and also disﬁguring Dolores, we begin to question the act of creating synthetic women for pleasure and the uncanny tenderness and violence of the gynoid / human relationship.