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For its birthday party earlier this summer, Lover Management took over London Soho’s arty Groucho Club, celebrating with all the esteemed leather-and-latex clad company the erotic talent management group keeps. None of its illustrious pornographer clients, though, may be more acclaimed than Vex Ashley.
Ashley, a lithe and milk white high priestess who looks slipped out from a tarot deck, is instantly recognizable for her penchant for layered intimates–coffee latex bodysuits, chocolate leather garters–a purse to her lips that suggests resting predator face, and the lustrous wet look locks of a witch who will not be drowned. Her Tumblr-era art school porn project, Four Chambers, has over the past decade birthed a prolific pornographic filmmaking career. She’s starred, directed, cast, and produced, dozens of films, which have at times channeled the foreboding atmosphere of cult indie hits including Robert Eggers’ The VVitch and David Cronenberg’s Crash; she was even brought on to create visuals for the orgy scene in the Mia-Goth’s-got-Alexander-Skarsgard-on-a-leash 2023 horror film Infinity Pool.
“Everyone was working in a very creative, DIY, way, and it made me really want to work on different sets, on different kinds of projects,” Ashley told Playboy. I’m very proud to make porn–I think it’s important and deserves more cultural recognition–but I am intrigued to see what Four Chambers would look like without explicit sex.”
Of course, she’d like to come to that conclusion on her own, and not with the UK government pressing the issue. Infinity Pool sees Skarsgard engage in equal parts depravity and viscosity, and that’s classic Four Chambers fare. Some of Ashley’s films are so rich in dripping cream and custard tones and textures, you might think you’re watching an advertisement for Loro Piana, except no one, not even that borrowed writhing snake, is wearing enough clothing to fill a shopping bag. One such film, Maman (2022), was screened at the Lover party, maybe for the last time. An opening scene shows Ashley dosing Domperidone, a prescription drug for boosting milk production, before engaging in a gingham threesome turned MILF fantasia. Under a UK government rule introduced in April meant to broadly curb the category of “incest porn,” Maman and its sequel would soon disappear from the Four Chambers website, for too closely resembling content that may construe lactation as promoting incest.
“I’m really sad, because the couple films that we’re going to have to lose are some … of my best and most personal,” Ashley said. “And the reality of working in sex is we need to basically shut the fuck up to avoid getting targeted by the regulators. There’s this idea that visibility is good, that we just need to normalize certain things, not just in sex work, but all kinds of communities, trans people, but when you’re organizing, visibility can be a curse too.”
Ashley and her lawyer must pick and choose which battles to fight, but she’s feeling jaded about pushing back hard on the crackdown against Mommy kinks. “I think a more important use of my energy is to make more work and keep going as much as I can.”
All hope is not lost for Four Chambers. For one, Ashley uploaded newly edited versions of the films this past week in order to comply with the new legislation. They’re now back online and available to view at afourchamberedheart.com. And two, while there’s no skirting government regulation without leaving the country, UK arts institutions don’t shrink when the government merely glances and grumbles in their direction the way US institutions have succumbed to the President’s whims.
When Four Chambers turned 10 years old in 2024, London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts celebrated that achievement with a film retrospective, placing Ashley’s work in dialogue with a legacy of feminist artists who exhibited here before her, including multimedia artist Carolee Schneemann, performance artist Cosey Fanni Tutti whose controversial 1976 show Prostitution put the full catalogue of the artist’s sex work practice in the context of fine art in a way that provoked such frothing media outrage the government limited visitors to viewing only one pornographic image at a time. Fast forward 48 years, and it was, albeit briefly, safe to screen Maman 2 there.
Ashley pushed the secreting envelope again last year, when in November, the Barbican invited Four Chambers to curate a performance as part of its Dirty Weekend, a celebration of the museum’s latest fashion exhibition, Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion. Dirty Looks explored the mucky overlap between earthy fashion and fetish, even displaying the late Queen Elizabeth II”s pristine black rubber wellies alongside the mud spackled pair Kate Moss once wore to navigate the Glastonbury muck.
For Dirty Weekend, Ashley revisited Echo Chamber (2025), a film that required her to construct a mirrored undressing room for an orgy premised on the idea “you are your own voyeur.” Ashley had been viewing her own body since she bought her first digital camera.
“Doing radical programming is actually becoming harder and harder for all kinds of cultural institutions and there’s a lot of back and forth to achieve what’s possible–if a nipple falls out, that’s fine, but a nipple can’t be purposely revealed,” Ashley explained. “I wanted to fuck in the box, and they took that to the higher-ups and it was negotiated down to second base.”
The privilege of these performances isn’t only performing at a cultural institution but engaging with her fans. “I’m in a space where I want to look people in the face, I think everybody’s feeling burnt out the way the online space no longer feels like a creative community, and we’re just there to be data farmed, so I think radical sex and porn is going to have to go back underground.”
Despite Four Chambers being online for more than a decade, there are zero analytics on the backend to measure the success of their films. “I don’t have any analytics on the films because I don’t want to be influenced by what film is doing the best; I don’t even know the gender breakdown of our subscribers, because I don’t want to hold a bunch of information for people who subscribe to our site. It’s important for people’s privacy, and I just don’t want to operate from a capitalist viewpoint.”
Direct engagement and crowdsourcing from Four Chambers’ fan base has definitely paid off for Ashley over the years. Not only have they found everything from that snake, to the estate grounds where they filmed their latest feature, Some Reddish Work (2025), which sees 1600s maidens overcome by wet ecstasy on the English countryside, Etsy-costumed mad thrusting lust lighted by candles and whipping fires, they’ve even borrowed heavy machinery from their fans, proof that even as the UK government keeps a keen eye on the nipple, kinks they can’t conceive will only continue to slip through their grasp. “I went around to somebody’s house who’s got a fucking machine that we used for a couple of shoots; they paid for it with their disability allowance from the government.”