Sojourner Mayer

Sojourner Mayer is a sculptor and performance artist. Recently focusing on sex work, specifically stripping and lap dancing, she seeks to further understand and explore her relationship with sex work, performance and feminism. Working often with textiles and using age old craft techniques such as knitting, looming, weaving, rug tufting, embroidery and bead looming, Mayer creates sometimes wearable, symbolic works. Through performance she attempts to portray the contrast between her need to make almost masochistically time intensive pieces and her fascination in selling an intimate experience. She shows the realities of working in a strip club through drawings and sketches that highlight the bizarre, unexpected and sometimes humorous things that can be experienced as a stripper. It is with this understanding that she attempts to bridge that gap within herself and come to her own understanding of sex work. She hopes to create a dialogue with an audience in order to raise more awareness of the realities of working as a stripper and what that entails compared to the glamorous or devious way it is presented in the media. Her work is intimate and extremely personal; she does not want to speak for an entire industry or seek to represent all sex workers, only to attempt to portray the overall experience she has had.