ART, SEX WORK, AND THE HETERONYMIC SELF | by Dr. Marie-Anne Mancio
White-polished toes emerge from silver-grey velvet folds. Soles turned upwards are presented to the viewer. A kneeling figure is seen from behind, her velvet dress clinging to the outlines of her. Feet reflect in the mirrored floor. Elsewhere a set of legs appears superimposed upon another, suggesting two women together, or maybe one, self-multiplying. Flames flicker on fat candles or have just been extinguished. Light glints on the glass beads of a rosary. These photographs are intimate, sensual, without being explicit. They produce an erotic charge through cropping and pose, and by withholding the face and most of the body. They promise proximity yet continually defer full access. Like the logic of the platform on which they circulate, they solicit desire and leave further revelation for the paying subscriber.
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The images form part of Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf’s interdisciplinary project Divine Commodity which,
through the construction of Dolores and her digital persona, Dolores “Lola” Mater Dolorosa, produced and circulated foot-fetish imagery through an OnlyFans account, promoted through Instagram and TikTok under versions of the handle “The Sole Divine.” The project encompasses the photographs and videos Fontaine-Wolf made in collaboration with photographer and filmmaker Diogo Soares Martins for Lola’s accounts; video diaries and behind-the-scenes photographs documenting the production process; Lola’s posts and AI (Chat GPT)-assisted written exchanges with followers; and a life-sized wax foot bought in a local Lisbon store that sold religious artefacts.
Fontaine-Wolf’s research developed from related questions: where is the line between self-commercialisation, self-objectification, and sex work; and, if traditional fine art methodologies are used to create images for a platform like OnlyFans, are these images still considered art, or does their placement alter their value? The account name, The Sole Divine, binds the physical sole of the foot to the homophone “soul” and thus to the language of divinity. Followers are invited to confess, surrender, worship, make offerings. Lola’s vocabulary draws on both Catholic devotion and femdom: ‘consume,’ ‘sin,’ ‘altar,’ ‘kneel,’ ‘salvation,’ ‘surrender,’ ‘offering,’ ‘hunger,’ ‘temptation,’ ‘sacrifice,’ and ‘worship.’ Every Sunday she issues a “Sunday sermon,” a confessional text in which fetish transaction is reframed as devotional ritual and subscriber loyalty as faith.
But Lola does not arrive fully formed.
For Fontaine-Wolf, Lola begins as an alter-ego through which she intends to conduct her research enquiry. Her original visual concept for static shots, however, has to change as algorithmic and policy pressures begin to impact the project. The Sole Divine accounts repeatedly experience content bans, shadowbanning, blocked biography terms, and link restrictions, while the precise triggers for enforcement remain opaque. This wider problem of platform censorship has itself become the subject of artistic work: in 2021 Lena Chen’s interactive game OnlyBans, made with sex workers and allies, asked players to assume the role of a sex worker trying to build an online audience while navigating content moderation, shadowbanning, real-name policies, and other forms of digital surveillance. TikTok’s 2024 Community Guidelines prohibit fetish or kink behaviour, including foot fetish, as well as sexualised framing, and content that facilitates access to sexual services. Because foot-centred or wine-and-feet videos are repeatedly flagged, Fontaine-Wolf pivots towards narrative video, devising mini-storylines and developing a more involved backstory for Lola. Censorship becomes one of the forces that determines the work’s form.
Dolores/Lola acquires an interior biography and devotional psychology. Named after her grandmother, she is a young woman who grew up in England, the daughter of a Spanish father who died when she was very young. Dolores never knew him, but inherited fragments of his life: his Bible, cross, rosary, and devotional paintings of the Virgin Mary. She attends Sunday services faithfully and struggles to reconcile her budding sexuality with the role models of femininity presented by the Catholic Church. In an act of transgression, she wears red shoes to mass and removes them during the service. As an adult she works in a specialist second-hand bookstore in London. The rituals she crafts are multi-sensory: ‘the touch of bare skin, the textures of velvet and stone, the taste of food and wine, the visual poetry of flowers and fruit.’ Fontaine-Wolf even maps Lola’s astrological chart – (ninth house Scorpio, Pluto twelfth), emotional generosity (Moon-Jupiter in Cancer), and a restless urge to innovate (Uranus on the IC, Aquarius rising) – which claims she embodies ‘the fusion of sacred and profane, traditional and radical, beautiful and taboo.’
The shift from static photography to narrative video creates additional labour. Fontaine-Wolf feels compelled to develop a more embodied performance and participates in “foot acting” sessions with expert Nithya Iyer, exploring how feet might communicate shyness, teasing, dominance, elegance, and aggression through gestures involving eggs, grapes, cake, cutlery, and rope. At the same time, the pressure to satisfy subscribers’ demands for interaction and new content means that Fontaine-Wolf needs to delegate some of Lola’s online exchanges. While Lola’s feet and body remain Fontaine-Wolf’s, she is also inhabited online by Camila Dumas de Moura Firmino, Sofia Konstantinidou, and Sofia Mezhevova.
By this point, Lola has evolved into something closer to a heteronym: in artistic and literary practice, this is a fictional, authorial self with its own distinct biography, voice, and worldview. The paradigmatic literary example is the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), who created Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and myriad lesser heteronyms. Marcel Duchamp’s gender-performative Rrose Sélavy offers an artistic precedent. Rrose, whose name puns on Eros, c’est la vie, was accorded the status of an artist with a parallel production. Heteronyms fracture the concept of the singular author, rendering the self divided and plural. Through Lola, Fontaine-Wolf adapts this device to platform capitalism. Generative AI helps shape a voice that changes depending on the platform: on Instagram, Lola is mysterious and formal; on TikTok, she is teasing and ethereal; on OnlyFans strict, intimate, and commercially directive.
Initially, Fontaine-Wolf conceives the video diaries simply as a means of documenting the project’s process and her experience of it. In costume, she speaks to camera with her face visible where Lola’s is always concealed on her accounts. Like Lola, however, the narrator of the diaries begins to evolve. She is no longer merely Fontaine-Wolf in costume, but Dolores: a figure who, unlike Lola, is aware that Lola is a construct. In an early iteration, Dolores’ blue-tinged bob references both a Y2K Instagram aesthetic and the sex-worker wig trope familiar from films such as Pretty Woman (1990) and Closer (2004). By choosing to retain the cliché that was rejected by director Sean Baker and hair- department head Justine Sierakowski for Anora (2024), Fontaine-Wolf signals that her character is fabricated. However, as Lola evolves into a heteronym, the wig no longer seems consistent with a woman whose aesthetic inspiration derives more from art history than internet culture. Fontaine-Wolf replaces it with a long, copper-red wig suggestive of Mary Magdalene and the “fallen woman” or “low-born woman” of Pre-Raphaelite imagery. Her make-up alludes, in openly kitsch fashion, to the character’s full moniker: Dolores “Lola” Mater Dolorosa. In Catholic tradition, the Mater Dolorosa, or Sorrowful Mother, grieves her dead son Christ. Fontaine-Wolf/Dolores therefore appears with appliquéd rhinestone tears and a headpiece like a halo.
When Fontaine-Wolf accelerates the video diary recordings to review the footage more efficiently, her voice is altered. She retains this accidental effect which hints at the disguised voices of confessionals while introducing another layer of separation between herself as artist and Dolores the narrator. Within this increasingly complicated arrangement of identities, who is Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf? Who is Dolores? Who is Lola? Where do the edges of these women overlap? At times, even Fontaine-Wolf is unsure. Early on in the video diaries, she says, ‘I think I’m Dolores, because I think me, as I am speaking to you here, I’m aware of the context, and I’m aware of the meaning of the name Dolores…and I think maybe who’s more out there is Lola.’
Followers, meanwhile, encounter Lola’s profile. They address their messages to her; it is her voice that gives commands, receives confessions, and demands offerings. Dolores and Lola are therefore not interchangeable. They are nested fictional selves: Dolores provides narrative interiority, while Lola is the public-facing commercial persona through whom that fiction enters real systems of attention, desire, and of course payment. The self presented online is distributed between a physical body, an invented biography, platform-specific language, algorithmic pressures, a social-media strategy developed with a small team of interns and consultants, delegated communication, and AI-assisted speech.
The question is no longer simply whether Fontaine-Wolf can make convincing fetish imagery. It becomes what happens when an artist-constructed sexualised online persona enters into paid relationships with viewers? The production of imagery alone cannot account for what takes place on OnlyFans. Sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein has argued that the sale of contemporary sexual services has moved beyond straightforward access towards the sale of an erotic encounter that appears to offer an ‘authentic, yet bounded, interpersonal connection,’ what she terms bounded authenticity. This concept is especially relevant to platforms such as OnlyFans, as well as to escorting, domination, camming, and “girlfriend experience” services in which clients may expect recognition of previous exchanges and other forms of apparently personalised attention. The client experiences a sense of being “seen,” even as the sex worker maintains professional limits around time, access, money, identity, feeling, and aftercare. Later scholarship develops Bernstein’s insight by showing how sex workers distinguish between intimacy sold as part of a service and intimacy retained within private life. M. Antònia Carbonero and Maria Gómez Garrido argue that while ‘the experience of authenticity is intentional, planned and marketed,’ it still requires real forms of emotional work. Arlie Hochschild’s theory of emotional labour provides a vocabulary for understanding the management of feeling and outward expression as paid work; sex-work scholars have adapted that framework to the production of commercial intimacy. Viviana Zelizer likewise argues that money and intimacy are not inherently incompatible, but are actively negotiated within differentiated social ties.
Lola’s “authenticity” is reliant on maintaining continuity across imagery and messaging. The fiction must be sufficiently consistent for followers to experience her as the same interlocutor over time. Too much repetition and the automation might be revealed. Too much intimacy may compromise Fontaine-Wolf’s boundaries. Too little might reduce follower engagement.
Even an AI-assisted reply requires labour. Fontaine-Wolf or another member of her team must read and interpret a subscriber’s message, generate or assess a response, determine whether it fits with Lola’s persona, and decide whether it is safe to send. Then there is the labour required to produce the images themselves within Fontaine-Wolf’s aesthetic. Shoots require Fontaine-Wolf to prepare her body: feet are moisturised, toenails painted, limbs arranged for the camera. Costumes and props must be sourced. Filming is planned around light, weather, temperature, and the availability of collaborators. Afterwards, come editing, captioning, scheduling, monitoring statistics, generating promotional material and adapting it across platforms.
Fontaine-Wolf soon realises she cannot spend an entire day editing three images, as might be normal within her studio practice, because a subscription platform demands continuous new content. Lola’s public authority, meanwhile, depends upon concealing almost all of that labour. She is not supposed to look cold, tired, doubtful, or bored. The economics intensify the disconnect between visibility and reward. According to project records, a successful TikTok carousel attracts approximately 13,500 views in twenty-four hours, around 1,200 likes, and 150 new followers, yet produces almost no conversion into paid subscriptions. After two months, approximately 600 TikTok followers yield two OnlyFans subscribers. Although OnlyFans places Lola’s account relatively high within its creator rankings, at that stage, it has earned only around US$50. Total income amounts to approximately €150 after months of near-full-time work by Fontaine-Wolf and her team. These figures cannot describe the “foot pics” platform economy as a whole: Divine Commodity is limited in duration and shaped by artistic as well as commercial objectives. They do, however, expose the discrepancy between visibility and financial return, and disprove the popular belief that online sex work – particularly selling “foot pics” – is a quick, effortless way to make money.
There are clear parallels here with the way artists are required to present themselves on social media. The unglamorous labour of administration, producing social media content, answering emails, writing funding applications, and maintaining secondary jobs to subsidise an artistic practice is typically glossed over. As Dolores reflects in the video diaries, artists are increasingly expected to transform private practice into publicly accessible narratives capable of being sold to galleries, funders, institutions, collectors, and audiences. For women artists, this economy can produce a particular contradiction: sexualised self-presentation may be encouraged as a route to visibility while simultaneously being used to discredit the resulting work. Leah Schrager has drawn attention to precisely this hypocrisy. The idea for her ONA project came to her in the last semester of her MFA program at Parsons, ‘when professors (and some students) kept saying that the images of me that I was placing in my art were too sexy to be art.’
The labour performed in Divine Commodity, however, is not merely analogous to self-promotion in the art world. Fontaine-Wolf produces and sells fetish material, corresponds with subscribers, and is paid. She therefore cannot be described as standing entirely outside sex work. Lola’s religious vocabulary structures these commercial exchanges. Fontaine-Wolf’s decision to make her a dominant, withholding sacred figure instead of, say, a submissive one, is born partly from self-protection: it limits the kinds of messages to which she, the artist, might be exposed. What transpires is not a purely parasocial relationship, because followers can communicate directly with Lola and receive personalised replies. It is an asymmetrical, commercially-mediated domination exchange in which attention itself is monetised. One fan, anonymised here as “A,” oscillates between desire and shame: ‘I want to try to avoid sin;’‘I bow to you!’ Lola reframes his guilt and resistance as erotic material: ‘I like that you’re trying to resist—it shows your strength as my submissive.’ Fan “B” confides his desire to be stepped on, responding to a video in which Lola’s feet are seen walking along a dining table laid with Renaissance-style ceramics and fresh oranges that she rolls beneath her soles before kicking to the ground. Given the orange is a symbol of fertility, it is easy to read this gesture as a kick in the balls.
The interaction extends the project beyond mere image-making into the maintenance of an apparently continuous interpersonal relationship. AI destabilises this still further. Fontaine-Wolf uses generative AI as a co-writer, a ventriloquist that helps Lola work beyond the limitations of the artist’s availability and emotional energy. If sex work already involves constructing a persona for a client, does it matter whether that persona’s messages are machine-assisted? If a follower experiences Lola as personally meaningful, does partial automation render that encounter unreal? The answer cannot be reduced to whether the emotion involved is “genuine.” A follower may experience real desire, comfort, disappointment, or attachment. Does he believe Lola is personally composing each reply? Would knowledge of AI assistance alter the meaning of the exchange? And who is responsible when a machine-written response intensifies a user’s emotional dependence or fails to recognise distress?
Such questions have become especially pressing on sexual-content platforms. Reuters reported in 2024 that OnlyFans’ terms prohibited creators from using AI chatbots to write chats or respond to direct messages, although some businesses attempted to circumvent the restriction by using human operators to approve and send AI-generated replies. TikTok likewise requires realistic AI-generated or substantially AI-altered visual and audio content to be labelled under its authenticity rules.
Regulation does not resolve the ethical problem. When A tells Lola that his life is ‘overwhelming, consuming my efforts and my time,’ Lola does not interrupt the fantasy to ask whether he is all right. She maintains her monetised persona: ‘Then come to me as you are—not emptied, but burning.’ Her other replies are shot through with similar sales tactics, intended to re-engage the fan, to tease him or imply that further payment will sustain the conversation. After sending content or receiving tips, she responds, ‘I noticed you received what I offered …and then went quiet’; ‘If your hunger is still alive, you know how to show it’; ‘Prove your worth.’
Nor is it possible to know whether Lola’s fans themselves use AI to compose their messages. Fan A’s grammatical errors – ‘clawing it’s way out of me,’ ‘unsatiable’ – are no guarantee of human authorship. Perhaps both sides of the exchange are performing authenticity via machines, each encountering the other as human.
Multidisciplinary artist Arvida Byström explored a related instability in her 2024 project In The Clouds. Byström fed clothed images of herself into a nudifying app and sold the resulting synthetic nude photos online. She also trained a digital chatbot counterpart to interact with users on her behalf. The images of her AI-generated body are produced by conspicuous glitches in the technology: pubic hair sprouts in the cleft of a knee; a breast emerges from her ribcage. Fontaine-Wolf’s images, by contrast, preserve an indexical relationship to her embodied feet while AI multiplies and hones her persona’s language. In Divine Commodity, the body remains photographically present and convincing while the speaking subject becomes unstable.
Once real subscribers enter the fiction, however, the project produces obligations as well as content. In her video diaries, Dolores/Fontaine-Wolf expresses uncertainty about the ethics of exhibiting Lola’s conversations with subscribers, even after names and identifying information have been removed. Sociologist Georg Simmel described secrecy as a social relationship structured by an unequal distribution of knowledge: who is permitted to know what, under which circumstances, and at what risk. This resembles the often-unspoken pact between sex worker and client. A client pays for erotic access, fantasy fulfilment, and so on, but on the understanding that the sex worker will not “betray” them by leaking details that could compromise their public, marital, familial, professional, or legal identity. Discretion itself becomes a form of labour.
The privilege of client invisibility can also obscure relations. Historically, sex
workers have mostly entered archival records for negative reasons: because they were arrested, classified for disease, or pathologized. They have since also become their own record-keepers, collecting oral histories and ephemeral objects connected to their labour. The Private Practices collection, held at the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive is one such example. Developed alongside performance, burlesque, and installation artist and curator “Coco Ono” (Kayla Tange), it is a living collection encompassing clothing, police reports, pay slips, text messages, oral histories, and screenshots, including an exchange of text messages between “k.t,” a sex worker/sugar baby and her sub/sugar daddy.
Lola’s subscribers may similarly have assumed that their messages belonged to a bounded commercial exchange. Agreeing to communicate with a sexual-content creator does not necessarily constitute agreement to become material within an artwork, exhibition, or catalogue essay. Lola’s followers are customers whose decisions, desires, and money help shape Divine Commodity, but they cannot automatically be called collaborators because they have not knowingly agreed to contribute to an artwork. There is an important reversal here. The subscriber initially occupies the role of consumer, purchasing access to Lola. Once his messages are incorporated into Divine Commodity, however, the consumer himself risks becoming material. Now his desire is something that can be extracted and framed; it can be circulated. The publication of subscriber messages therefore risks reproducing the very asymmetry of power the project examines. Fontaine-Wolf retains the power to edit the archive. For this reason, private exchanges are anonymised and quoted only where analytically necessary, rather than offered as entertainment.
Within a week of posting for the first time, Lola’s account receives a message from someone claiming to be fourteen, asking, ‘is it okay that I feel attracted to women’s feet like this?’ Although there was no proof of the fan’s age, or indeed their sex, Fontaine-Wolf is disturbed by the message, which exposes the limits of her ability to know who is on the other side of the screen. It also reveals another, less visible dimension of platform labour: creators may suddenly be required to make safeguarding decisions for which they may be emotionally unprepared.
Sex work also demands the continual management of one’s own visibility. Erving Goffman distinguishes between the “discredited” person, whose stigmatised status is already known or visible, and the “discreditable” person, whose stigmatised identity remains concealed. The latter has the daily challenge of managing information, deciding what to reveal and to whom, and at what risk. Researchers Cecilia Benoit, S. Mikael Jansson, Michaela Smith, and Jackson Flagg have applied Goffman’s distinction to sex work, arguing that many off-street workers are discreditable rather than visibly discredited. Not identifiable on sight as sex workers, their labour includes continual information management across clients, family, partners, health providers, neighbours, and digital platforms. Lynzi Armstrong and Cherida Fraser have similarly described the ‘disclosure dilemma’ in sex work, noting how stigma and criminalisation may compel sex workers to live double lives and to conceal their occupation. Gail Pheterson’s concept of the ‘whore stigma’ describes how social meanings attached to sex work can be extended to discipline women more generally.
The danger is not that sex work somehow contaminates an artist’s identity, but that audiences allow the stigma attached to it to discredit identities and activities outside the commercial encounter. With Divine Commodity, Fontaine-Wolf temporarily exposes her established artistic identity to this stigma. At the same time, she possesses the ability to port material generated for commercial sexual exchange back into the cultural space of the contemporary art world. A photograph may be devalued as fetish content on OnlyFans and elevated as contemporary art on Artsy, even though nothing intrinsic to the image has changed. The artist’s name, exhibition, catalogue, and interpretive text all participate in that transformation.
The multiplication of identity at the centre of Divine Commodity also belongs to a feminist art history in which the self is understood not as a stable essence but as a sustained construction. Beginning in 1973, Lynn Hershman Leeson created and documented Roberta Breitmore, an “alternative personality” who acquired credit cards, an interim driver’s license, and a bank account, rented an apartment, joined Weight Watchers, had her own clothing, handwriting, and signature make-up, and even multiplied into four people before being exorcised in 1978. In 2014, Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections unfolded as a scripted Instagram and Facebook performance inspired by extreme makeover culture. Over five months, Ulman morphed from the pastel haze of wholesome small-town blogger through ‘LA bitch’ (‘Model. Artist. Addicted to sugar’) to detoxed, clean-living, #blessed. Between 2015 and 2020, Leah Schrager likewise appropriated her own image to manufacture ONA, musician, artist, and model @OnaArtist on Instagram and Snapchat, conceived as a celebrity-as-art-practice project.
The effectiveness of these works depended upon the audience encountering constructed identities within the same social systems in which “authentic” identities usually circulate. Fontaine-Wolf’s Lola extends this lineage into a subscription-based sexual-content economy. Her existence must be maintained through images, captions, differentiated voices, direct messages, statistics, and repeat transactions.
Lola is equally relevant to the aliases adopted by sex workers to help differentiate private and professional lives. A different name may offer some protection from intrusive clients who could stalk or doxx them. It can also enable branding and extend an online presence into a searchable history. Unlike Sophia Giovannitti – artist, writer, and sex worker – who collapsed her identities under her legal name in 2021, Fontaine-Wolf multiplies identity to preserve distance between herself the artist, Dolores the intermediary character through whom the experience is narrated, and Lola the wholly fictional bookshop worker and sex worker, Tiktoker and OnlyFans model who presents as “real,” if faceless, to followers. As Fontaine-Wolf puts it, ‘[Dolores] is the visualisation of the blurred boundaries between the character one creates when doing this type of work and the real self – as much as you try to create boundaries these are inevitably porous.’
Although Fontaine-Wolf may not have set out to make a work about sex work, entering a paid sexual-content market does place Divine Commodity in dialogue with histories of sex work and art, as well as with sex-worker art. In Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023), Sophia Giovannitti refuses the notion that the art world and the sex industry are opposite moral and economic realms – one supposedly elevated, the other degraded. Instead, she sees them as structurally entangled markets built around desire, fantasy, intimacy, cultivated authenticity, precarious labour, rich patrons, and the conversion of an intimate experience into value. Her performance work Untitled (Incall) presented at Recess Art in New York in 2021, transformed part of the gallery into an “incall”: in sex worker terminology, an appointment taking place at a site determined by the worker. The work referenced Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003) in which Fraser arranged and filmed a 60-minute sexual encounter (her audio describes it as ‘making love’) with an art collector in a hotel room. Fraser had pre-sold him the first copy of the limited-edition video, reportedly for $20,000. Fraser’s work has often been read as materialising the fantasy-based relationship between artist and collector through paid sexual exchange. Giovannitti’s objection is that metaphorical comparisons obscure the more interesting ‘material commonalities’ between artistic and sexual labour. Some young artists sell sexual services to wealthy clients to survive and may later find themselves selling their artwork to those same buyers.
Fontaine-Wolf likewise enters a sexual-content market literally rather than metaphorically. Conscious that almost any image, regardless of medium or context, can be appropriated for sexual gratification, she does not simply upload previous artworks to OnlyFans and observe their reception. She produces new imagery specifically for a sexual-content market and asks whether those same images can simultaneously function as art. Divine Commodity is not evidence that art and sex work are interchangeable. It examines instead how art institutions and sexual-content platforms convert related materials and relations such as bodily access, authored persona, intimacy, and fantasy into value, all the while distributing legitimacy and stigma differently.
Fontaine-Wolf’s participation nevertheless takes place within the comparatively protected frame of a time-limited art project. She has collaborators, an existing professional identity, and the possibility of stopping. The project is not the sole basis of her livelihood, and its documentation may become an exhibition, essay, and source of artistic recognition. These circumstances do not invalidate the knowledge produced through the project, but they establish its limits. Divine Commodity offers situated knowledge of one experiment in platform-based sexual labour; it cannot stand in for the experiences of sex workers whose housing, immigration status, family relationships, safety, or long-term economic survival may depend upon remaining in the industry. This distinction becomes particularly clear in relation to Marina Abramović’s Role Exchange. On 2 July, 1976, between 8p.m. and 10p.m., Abramović exchanged places with an Amsterdam sex worker who called herself Suze. Abramović sat in Suze’s red-light district window while Suze went to the artist’s exhibition opening at Amsterdam’s De Appel gallery. Their experiences were recorded on separate 16mm cameras. The work is useful for drawing parallels between display in art and sex work, but the stakes are unequal. Abramović’s failure to secure clients did not threaten her livelihood. Ultimately, she did not actually exchange sex for money so was not impacted by whore stigma.
Two related but ethically distinct art-historical genealogies should therefore be separated. In one, paid sexual exchange becomes a temporary role or medium through which artists explore patronage, danger, commodification, or the display of the body. In the other, sex-worker artists produce work from within the material conditions, expertise, and political struggles of sexual labour. Examples of the latter include: Cosey Fanni Tutti’s contributions to COUM Transmissions’ Prostitution exhibition (ICA, London, 1976) in which she used material produced through her own work in pornographic magazines, modelling, and striptease; artist, activist, and performer Carol Leigh, or Scarlot Harlot, who used performance, writing, and video as instruments of political self-representation; Annie Sprinkle’s movement from porn performer to artist, educator, sexologist, and activist which similarly rejects the assumption that sexual labour invalidates other forms of cultural or intellectual authority.
In Watch Me Work (2012), performance artist and queer, sex-worker-rights activist Liad Hussein Kantorowicz displayed real-time erotic chat and live performances from the pay-by-the-minute Israeli chat website for which she worked. Multiple projections allowed the gallery audience to compare the client-facing view with the behind-the-scenes labour and staging excluded from that view, thus deconstructing the fantasy as it was being presented online. Camille Waring’s ongoing Whoretography (2019-) similarly examines how sex workers construct and circulate self-images online. As Waring writes, ‘It’s one thing to exist in art as a sex worker, [but] as long as somebody else is depicting you, you can’t be in control of your own image.’ Recent exhibitions including Decriminalised Futures (ICA, London, 2022), With Legs Wide Open: A Whore’s Ride Through History (Schwules Museum, Berlin, 2024), and its expanded successor, Sex Work: A Cultural History (Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, 2026) have increased institutional visibility for this much longer history of sex-worker-led cultural production.
Divine Commodity occupies an unstable position between these genealogies. Like Watch Me Work, it exposes the hidden labour behind sexual-content production through video diaries and behind-the-scenes photographs. But Fontaine-Wolf also exposes the labour required to make that content conform to her artistic criteria. She describes an attempt to shoot outdoors ‘in the kind of golden hour evening sun.’ The rock pools and baptismal, Ophelia-like setting she envisages are thwarted by a full moon and high tides. Not only does the setting fail to look as she imagined, but ‘I hadn’t really thought about the fact that spending a long time in the water would make my feet go really wrinkly, and obviously it’s just not beautiful, you know it’s just like really wrinkly feet.’
Her frustration at the wasted time, energy, and resources and the knowledge that she is going to have to repeat the shoot, is not mitigated by learning that there is also a specialist market for photographs of wrinkly feet. The anecdote suggests that a body can rarely fail to be commodifiable; the platform can assign a fetish category to almost any physical condition. But it also reveals the distance between general sexual marketability and the artist’s highly specific construction of Lola’s aesthetic. What matters is not merely whether someone might desire the image, but whether the image maintains the particular visual authority of the persona.
Behind-the-scenes photographs expose still more of the artist’s working conditions: Fontaine-Wolf lying on the sofa, nursing a hot-water bottle, as she is logged into Lola’s account; her wrapped in woollens because the studio is so cold; the pet cats that sneak into the shoot and leave unwanted traces of their fur on velvet props. The polished sensuality of the finished image depends upon excluding these material circumstances from view.
Having followed Divine Commodity away from the image and into the labour, relationships, economic pressures, and ethical obligations required to maintain Lola, what happens when we return to Fontaine-Wolf’s initial enquiry: if imagery produced specifically for OnlyFans and TikTok is designed to function as fetish content, does it sustain its status as art? One way of approaching this question is to compare Lola’s imagery with Fontaine-Wolf’s existing practice. The latter has evolved from painting towards what she terms a physi-digital process, typically involving her own, sometimes nude, body. Images are photographed, layered, erased, reworked digitally or manually in paint then re-introduced; chance elements that occur during these processes may be retained. The process repeatedly destabilises the distinction between painted and photographic image, between physical and digital object.
The visual language of Divine Commodity does not originate with Lola. Mirrors, fragmented and faceless bodies, doubling, reflective surfaces, sumptuous fabrics, eroticism, religious symbolism, vanitas and memento mori recur throughout Fontaine-Wolf’s earlier work. Her 2022 series Naturezza Morta, for instance, uses mirrors and her own body to construct a contemporary memento mori from the visual language of the reclining nude and Dutch Golden Age still-life painting. In La Petite Mort, the body lies among fruit, feathers, flowers, meat and a skinned rabbit; blue-pink flesh and creased white fabric lend the eerie composition a Baroque grandeur, while the title plays on the French expression for orgasm. Mirrors are equally central to CorpoReal (2023), where Fontaine-Wolf’s body appears merged with a goat carcass and an orchid. Her face remains largely hidden; a partial gaze returns via a mirror. The device fractures the body into competing realities and also invokes the long art-historical tradition of the mirror held by Venus in Old Master paintings, in which reflection enabled the viewer to consume the female nude from multiple viewpoints simultaneously. Fontaine-Wolf takes that apparatus of visual possession and makes it unstable since the reflected body cannot easily be reconstructed into a coherent whole.
The continuity becomes more apparent still in the works brought together in her solo institutional exhibition Flesh & the Mirror (HausKunst Mitte, Berlin, 2024). These too revel in Baroque drama, pronounced chiaroscuro, asymmetrical compositions, and reflective surfaces, alongside a visceral array of velvet, fruit, animal carcasses, and Fontaine-Wolf’s own headless or partially concealed body. Mirrors fragment, distort, and multiply limbs, producing uncanny spaces in which it becomes difficult to distinguish between one body and several. In Pieta, Dolorosa, and What Lies Beneath, this familiar vocabulary becomes explicitly devotional: blue velvet is curtain, wound, and sacred colour; reflective surfaces are haloes and mirrors; tripartite structures recall altarpieces. Seen in this context, the imagery Fontaine-Wolf creates for Lola is immediately recognisable as consistent with her oeuvre.
Yet Lola’s evolution from alter-ego to heteronym complicates that continuity. If Lola is to function as a heteronym, she cannot simply produce the work Fontaine-Wolf would have made without her. Total stylistic continuity would collapse Lola back into Fontaine-Wolf and undermine the distinction the project laboured to construct. The more revealing question is therefore not whether Lola’s imagery can qualify as art, but how an existing artistic language mutates when attributed to a heteronym and subjected to the pressures of a sexual-content platform.
Lola inherits aspects of Fontaine-Wolf’s symbolism and aesthetic, but she subjects them to a different set of pressures: namely, the conventions of foot-fetish imagery; subscriber preference; censorship; algorithmic demands; the commercial imperative to convert attention into payment. In Divine Commodity, carcasses and the more abject reminders of mortality recede. Greys, whites, and muted pinks soften the flesh, while dark backgrounds isolate the visible body from a fully intelligible environment. The foot becomes unusually prominent. White toenail polish enters the images as a recognised code within foot-fetish culture. Compositions become more immediately legible, produced at a speed unfamiliar to Fontaine-Wolf’s studio practice.
Yet the photographs and reels avoid genital display and explicit sexual action. Their eroticism lies in anticipation. The body is rationed. Cropping at the waist or shin turns Lola into distributable fragments. Mirrors double the visible body; a single persona splinters into further selves. Whilst this mirroring has long been part of Fontaine-Wolf’s lexicon, it may, ironically, also have helped the images evade online censorship: Leah Schrager adopted a related device in her Infinity Selfie series (2016-2017), digitally multiplying nude self-portraits to circumvent social-media bans on female nudity.
Lola herself, moreover, is not an artefact in the conventional sense. She is durational and performative. She exists only through continued enactment: Fontaine-Wolf must dress, pose, and move as her; photographs and videos must be produced; captions written; subscribers answered; accounts maintained; payments received; algorithms negotiated. Other members of Fontaine-Wolf’s team can temporarily speak as Lola, while generative AI assists in producing her language. Her identity is distributed between bodies, machines, images, and accounts, yet audiences encounter the accumulation of these activities as one woman.
In this respect, the imagery produced for Divine Commodity might be understood in several ways simultaneously. Constructed according to a recognisable artistic methodology, it is also commercial fetish content when it appears on OnlyFans. Within the wider project, each image is one mechanism through which Lola can appear and transact with followers. Returned to a gallery space or catalogue, it can operate again as an autonomous visual object, and as a trace or documentation of a performance that occurred elsewhere.
None of its functions necessarily cancels the others. What changes is the network of relations around the image. There is a precedent for understanding the sustained persona rather than any individual artefact as the primary artistic form. In Hershman Leeson’s aforementioned Roberta Breitmore, the latter cannot be reduced to a particular photograph, bank account, item of clothing, or document. Those objects helped make Breitmore socially operative, but the work lay in the sustained construction of a person capable of entering the systems normally reserved for a “real” individual. Divine Commodity similarly shifts the centre of gravity away from the isolated photograph or reel and towards the production of Lola: a fictional woman made coherent enough to enter real systems of sexual desire, labour, censorship, exchange, and payment.
Lola’s imagery makes this instability especially legible because the project deliberately brings two economies of devotion into contact: Catholic worship and commercial fetish. The offering becomes a payment, the worshipper a subscriber or fan, the confession a direct message, and access to the sacred body a promise that is extended and deferred in perpetuity. Her significance also lies in the position she claims within Catholic imagery. In addition to referencing the Virgin through her name, Lola absorbs elements associated with Eve, the temptress. In a reel, we see her from behind as she bites into an apple. Equally potent are her evocations of Mary Magdalene, most visibly in her waist-length, copper-red wig. The canonical Gospels do not identify the Magdalene as a sex worker. She appears as a disciple of Christ, a witness at the Crucifixion, and the first to see him after the Resurrection. A much-contested figure, her image as the penitent sinner was popularised in the West after Pope Gregory the Great’s homily of 591 CE helped consolidate a tradition that merged Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the unnamed ‘sinful woman’ who anoints Christ’s feet in Luke 7. The conflation produced an extraordinarily enduring type, exemplified in paintings such as Titian’s: the beautiful, long-haired penitent whose eroticised body could signal sexual sin and spiritual redemption. A jar of ointment became one of her attributes, evoking a sequence of kneeling at Christ’s feet, wetting them with her tears, drying them with her hair, and anointing them. Lola exposes how the sacred tradition is already concerned with a narrative of feet, touching, submission, and devotion. Fontaine-Wolf draws upon this unstable inheritance but refuses the penitent’s subordinate position.
The Madonna/whore dialectic is another recurring motif within her work. But Lola does not simply occupy one side of it. She moves between Madonna, Magdalene, Eve, saint, priestess, and dominatrix. Fontaine-Wolf’s intervention also belongs to a feminist history in which women artists have contested who is authorised to embody sacred power. Mary Beth Edelson inserted contemporary women artists into the compositional structure of Leonardo’s Last Supper, replacing an exclusively male order with a feminist artistic community. Renée Cox has presented her own Black body in the place of Christ. Alma López’s queer reworking of the Virgin of Guadalupe sees a traditionally venerated figure as an embodied, sexual, and Chicana presence. ORLAN’s Saint-ORLAN persona and her use of Baroque imagery questions ideals of femininity and sanctity.
Other artists have collided religious ritual with pornography, BDSM, martyrdom, and queer desire. Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) presents a Black Madonna surrounded by collaged images from porn magazines. Robert Mapplethorpe’s Catholic formation shaped photographs, underwear, and prayer cards into objects with a fetishistic charge. Ron Athey’s performances draw upon martyrdom, bloodletting, and ordeal, while Pierre et Gilles create camp and glossy homoerotic images of saints, martyrs, sailors, and Madonnas.
In such works, religious imagery is not used merely to provoke. It asks whose body may represent divinity, whose desire is culturally legitimate. Annie Sprinkle is particularly relevant here because her
Neo Sacred Prostitute recasts the sex worker as healer and educator. Lola’s sermons enter similar territory, although from a more ambivalent position: sacred language protects the artist, structures a commercial fantasy, and converts payment into a sign of belief. When Fontaine-Wolf uses AI to interrogate Lola about how she understands her work and resolves the apparent contradiction between her faith and her OnlyFans, AI answers as Lola:
‘In this digital altar, I am both priestess and goddess. My images are offerings – carefully crafted acts of devotion and rebellion. They echo the religious rituals I grew up with, but I flip the script. I place myself – not men, not tradition – at the centre of sacred power. My sexuality is not something to be possessed or tamed; it is a language of authority, of command, of self-possession.’
Kneeling poses and elevated soles also complicate the hierarchy of devotion. Lola may kneel for the camera, but the imagined follower or, in her words, ‘devotee,’ is positioned below her foot. The face is withheld so the viewer is prevented from obtaining the reciprocal recognition of her gaze. Access is partial and that structures her authority.
The same logic enters the project’s sculpture. Fontaine-Wolf originally intended to make a life-sized silicone cast of her own foot but, because of time constraints, ultimately uses a wax foot bought from a religious shop in her local Lisbon. The unrealised cast and the found foot carry different implications. A silicone cast would have been indexical, produced through direct contact with Fontaine-Wolf’s body. The wax foot is a pre-existing devotional commodity appropriated by Lola. It nevertheless carries Divine Commodity’s questions into sculpture and further enacts the commodification of the self.
The foot draws upon the Catholic vocabulary of relics – saints’ bodily remains such as the Magdalene’s tooth; objects associated with saints or Jesus, such as the Holy Foreskin of Christ, believed to mediate divine power and healing – and anatomical ex-votos. Historically, the monetisation of Catholicism through the often-illicit trade in relics created a geography of devotion shaped by pilgrimage routes. Visually, there is a powerful contrast between the potentially abject nature of blood, bone, hair, severed heads, and the exquisitely crafted reliquaries fashioned from gold, silver, enamels, and jewels in which these remains are contained. Like the relic, an ex-voto might also take the form of a body part, albeit as a representation rather than bodily matter. Wax anatomical offerings left at shrines such as the Marian pilgrimage site of Fátima in central Portugal act as material substitutes for petitioning bodies that have been – or hope to be – healed. They enable supplicants to be present at the sacred site even when they are elsewhere.
Fontaine-Wolf’s proposed cast and the found wax foot transport this history into an alternative economy of devotion. Like an ex-voto, the wax foot isolates and substitutes for a body part. Like a commodity, it can be presented and sold as a unique or limited-edition artwork and imagined as something that might also be desired by Lola’s OnlyFans consumers. Here the contradiction embedded in the project’s title becomes material. The foot is divine: a relic-like substitute invested with devotional presence. It is also a commodity: detached and exchangeable; capable of circulating through different economies of desire and value.
Isolated and offered up to view, the foot acquires a fetishistic charge. William Pietz’s genealogy of the fetish is useful here because it shows how the term emerged from Portuguese colonial encounters in West Africa and accrued associations with manufactured objects, magical power, economic value, and misplaced material agency. Europeans pathologised how Others invested objects with spiritual power, all the while ignoring similar attributions within Christianity and commodity culture.
Relics, ex-votos, and fetishes belong to distinct histories and should not be collapsed into one another. Yet the found foot can nevertheless stand in for Lola’s absent body and can be possessed in a way that the living woman cannot. Wax intensifies this instability. It has an unsettling resemblance to flesh, but it can soften, crack, stain, and deform. Unlike silicone which is associated with prosthetics, cosmetic intervention, mould-making, and erotic clothing or objects, wax is also the material of the candles that recur throughout Lola’s images. A devotional candle is consumed through the act of worship; it connects the body to mortality and the memento mori: flesh made present in a substance poised to melt.
The proposed cast also belongs to a feminist sculptural history in which the body part becomes index and self-portrait. From the early 1960s, Alina Szapocznikow cast mouths, breasts and other body parts in synthetic materials, sometimes transforming them into repeatable domestic objects such as lamps and ashtrays. Read through this lineage, Fontaine-Wolf’s foot asks what happens when a body (part) is detached from personhood, when it is replicated and offered to different economies of devotion, desire, touch, and ownership. The foot is sacred because it has been separated; valuable because access to the whole body is withheld.
This might also describe Lola.
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The project ends abruptly following a personal tragedy. A planned final shoot involving Eve, the Garden of Eden, serpents, and foot washing does not take place. Fontaine-Wolf stops posting without warning and avoids Lola’s accounts for approximately a month. One especially committed follower deletes his account after Lola disappears. It is impossible to know why. Does he feel deceived or abandoned? Do unrelated circumstances prompt his departure? Nevertheless, the deletion indicates that Lola’s absence registered within the social world the project had created. The episode brings bounded authenticity into an unexpectedly literal form. The commercial persona may be fictional, yet her absence can still be experienced.
With the termination of the project, Fontaine-Wolf experiences both relief and bereavement. She is glad to escape the toxicity of the platform environment and the relentless workload, yet she also mourns the character she has inhabited. In Dolores Lola Mater Dolorosa, the artist creates a saint manufactured for the age of platform desire: generated, adored, purchased, fragmented, and archived. Her foot is at once commodity, relic, and fetish; her words oscillate between prayer, prompt, and sales technique; her photographs are devotional offerings, structured by the promise of further access. Through her, Divine Commodity suggests that devotion has not disappeared from secular digital culture. It has migrated into the subscription, the chat window, the metric, the cropped photograph, and the machine-assisted voice.
If Fontaine-Wolf began by asking whether images produced for OnlyFans could still be art, Divine Commodity expands that question substantially. The formal continuity between Lola’s imagery and Fontaine-Wolf’s earlier work secures its place within her practice, while its divergences suggest the emergence of Lola’s own heteronymic aesthetic shaped by foot-fetish conventions and other pressures of platform labour. Yet the project’s stakes extend much further. It becomes a meditation on sexual labour and commodification; on the porous boundaries between performed and “authentic” identities; on the precarious economies negotiated by artist and/or sex worker; on the transformation of bodies and intimacy into value; on how much of oneself must be made available in order to sustain connection; and on what becomes of authenticity when human relationships are mediated.
Lola is produced not by Fontaine-Wolf alone, but through an exchange between artist, collaborators, audience, platform, and AI. She is authored and acted upon. She is fictional yet socially operative. What begins as a question about the status of individual images migrates towards a larger question of where the artwork itself is located. In this sense, Divine Commodity no longer resides neatly in a singular image or even body of images. The encompassing artwork, ultimately, is Lola.
And, as the project’s title hints, she can be monetised and still retain an element of unknowability. When questioned about how she might continue in another form, Lola imagines she can be reconstructed by the viewer, conjured from traces: the wig, the rosary, the shoes, the silk nightdress. She has acquired enough presence and accumulated enough imagery and interpersonal history that she seems capable of continuing independently ‘in the ether,’ as Fontaine-Wolf says, even after the artist stops performing her.
Like a heteronym whose author has ceased to write, Lola remains latent within the archive.
Marie-Anne Mancio
