MADDIE ADORE
Maddie Adore is a London-based sex worker and artist whose expanded practice engages autotheory, adornment and queerness through multidisciplinary performance and self portraiture. Her work has been featured in the Museum of Sex Objects, the Box Soho, the British Museum, i-D and the Wellcome Collection. Her ongoing PhD, Queer Whores, explores the appropriation of sex worker aesthetics and culture in the arts. Maddie is also a founding member of East London Strippers Collective, working to develop arts-based advocacy initiatives.
Origin of a Queer Whore, 2025, Polaroid (scan)
Origin of a Queer Whore is a self-portrait responding to Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866), addressing the role of sex workers in art history and image-making. Subject to censorship, Courbet’s painting - commissioned for a private erotica collection - mirrors contemporary digital patronage of sex workers and is structured by logics of ownership, control, and the male gaze. Contemporary platform moderation extends these through algorithmic and moral regulation, determining which bodies are visible and under what conditions. This work asserts a decisively queer, sex worker gaze through self-fashioning, with hyper-feminine styling and heart-shaped pubic hair refusing the standards of palatable femininity shaped by heterosexual male desire. It speaks to the fact that although Corbet’s painting prompted Meta to loosen nudity restrictions for art, censorship is increasingly harsh, disproportionately silencing LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, femme, and sex worker communities.
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All works in this exhibition are available to purchase. To find out more, please email: loveforsale.exhibit@gmail.com