PotGirls

Our culture has been stagnant, aimless, and repetitive for more than a decade. Or at least it sometimes feels that way, with so much mainstream art focused on nostalgia, and modern cinema dominated by remakes, sequels, prequels, and reboots. And while it’s certainly true that lots of indie artists are sharing exciting work on social media, the most provocative contemporary art is often doomed to obscurity; algorithmic feeds have a tendency to flatten culture, weeding out anything too strange or ambiguous in favour of an endless stream of unobtrusive, unchallenging, and easily replicable sameness. In spite of this, there is one niche where the spirit of the avant-garde still feels alive and well: fetish art.

Spend some time browsing through any niche fetish art community and you will find yourself confronted by imagery so peculiar, so provocative, so surreal as to make Dali’s Lobster Telephone look like the 2019 Lion King remake. I have already made a general case for taking fetish art seriously as a form of avant-garde experimentation. Here, I want to narrow my focus on one particular example.

ShyDevo’s Pot Girls

Between 2016 and 2017, a DeviantArt user called ShyDevo shared dozens of examples of  his “Pot Girl” art. For the most part, these are simple Photoshop composites of women’s heads onto the tops of vases (or “pots,” in his terminology). The artist clarified the nature of these “pots” in one caption where, speaking in the voice of a Pot Girl, he explained, “my beautiful pot is an integral part of my body like an oyster or tortoise shell.”

Sometimes ShyDevo’s Pot Girls are adorned with jewelry, scarves, or dresses. Some have wheels. More often, however, these strange creatures get around using a single horse leg which sprouts from the bottom of their pot. In one caption, the artist describes this appendage as “a hoofed bionic chassis printed on a sophisticated 3D printer and connected to the girl's blood, lymphatic, and nervous systems via a special multi-interface channel with a plug-in port located at her ‘hips’ under the clothes together with a fast-spinning, horizontally positioned, battery-powered, heavier gyroscopic wheel which helps the girl keep her balance while standing, walking, or hopping so that she can never fall.”

The complexity of the Pot Girls’ world-building might mislead you into thinking these are characters in some kind of Lynchian space opera. Rest assured: this is smut. Indeed, ShyDevo is not shy about explaining the Pot Girls’ sexual functions. “The bionic ‘fauness’ chassis on which the pot is mounted provides not only a strong & dextrous leg but also a functional & sensitive vagina,” he explains in one caption. In another, he describes how one Pot Girl’s breasts are “safely hidden,” but can be readily accessed via “two round, cone-shaped lids on the front side” of her pot.

I will be the first to admit that the technical quality of ShyDevo’s Pot Girl art is lacking. But art does not need to be technically flawless or even pleasant to look at in order to be engaging. Punk music, noise music, abstract painting, and conceptual art frequently challenge aesthetic norms; nonetheless, these are all valid and important modes of artistic expression. In my view, ShyDevo is an outsider artist whose Pot Girls are fascinating, not because they are pretty to look at, but because of their raw strangeness and the absurd complexity of their lore.

To stand alongside this essay, I have created my own series of Pot Girl artworks; a few are scattered amongst the text and the rest can be seen in my new Pot Girls gallery. These are at once an homage to ShyDevo, and also an opportunity to explore the themes lurking beneath the Pot Girl fetish. (Note that I have not spoken with ShyDevo, nor do I share his fetish. The analysis that follows is entirely my own opinion and comes from the perspective of an art enthusiast, not a psychologist.)

Pot Girl with Voilets and Cock

Unpacking the Fetish

To understand Pot Girls, we must acknowledge the obvious theme of erotic objectification. In the context of BDSM, the term “objectification” typically refers to a role play scenario in which a consenting adult is treated like an object for erotic enjoyment, ideally in a context with clear boundaries, a safe word, aftercare, etc. Note that “erotic objectification” as I’m using the term here should not be confused with the objectification of women more broadly—a complex sociological phenomenon which fuels inequality and does very real harm to women. 

Often, erotic objectification play takes the form of one party being treated as a pet, a sex doll, or a piece of furniture. Setting aside their peculiar trappings, ShyDevo’s Pot Girls are just one more implementation of this common fetish. Indeed, given the science fiction world-building, we should probably understand the Pot Girl as a type of sex robot, not so different from the androids explored in mainstream films like Subservience (2024) or Ex Machina (2014).

What’s unique about ShyDevo’s Pot Girls, as compared to sex robots in other media, is their confinement inside of a vase. This is, perhaps, a kind of erotic bondage, vaguely similar to rope play. But the vase also serves a very clear symbolic purpose. The specific vases ShyDevo uses in his art are meant to display cut flowers. Clearly, this is how we are meant to understand his Pot Girls: they are beautiful objects being put on display by their owner.

In my own approach to Pot Girl fetish art, I opted to lean into the idea that these creatures might be understood as surrealist sex toys. This is why dildos and cock sheathes are featured throughout my compositions. It’s also the reason I opted to replace ShyDevo’s composited women’s faces with mannequin heads or, most fittingly, a novelty blow-up doll.

Pot Girl with Flowers and Cock

The Pot Girl as Surrealist Still Life

The thing that piqued my interest about the Pot Girl fetish is less the element of erotic objectification than the connection with floral still life. For the most part, ShyDevo’s images are composed in the manner of a floral still life, only the bouquets have been replaced by the heads of attractive women (including at least one well-known adult film actress). There is a symbolic logic to this choice; although flowers are not sex objects in a literal sense, they are certainly associated with femininity and, moreover, the aesthetic similarity between vulvas and flowers petals has been explored by many artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe and Imogen Cunningham. In my own Pot Girl compositions, I emphasize the connection to floral still life by including artificial flowers alongside my artificial heads.

Importantly, the floral still life is not merely a celebration of beauty—those paintings are also about death. In some early Dutch paintings, the connection between flowers and death was made explicit through the inclusion of references to that famous passage from the book of Isaiah: “All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades.” Even without the biblical connection, floral still life remains death-haunted simply because of the implication of transience. Those flowers might be beautiful today, but the viewer knows they will not last long… Many of my own Pot Girl compositions include human teeth in the arrangement as a nod to the morbid underpinnings of this art form.

On Objectification

For the purposes of analysis, I previously made a clean distinction between erotic objectification (a fun role-play scenario) and the broader objectification of women (a destructive cultural phenomenon). It is certainly true that a woman who strongly opposes our culture’s objectification of women can, nonetheless, enjoy erotic objectification in a safe and controlled setting. There is no contradiction there. But this also does not preclude situations where the boundaries between these two forms of objectification are blurred. When we are looking at an artist’s rendering of some niche fantasy, it can be difficult to distinguish between a fantastical depiction of an erotic objectification scene, as compared to a sincere endorsement of the cultural objectification of women. This is particularly true in the visual arts, which tend to embrace ambiguity to a much greater extent than long-form narrative media (e.g., film or literature). As a result, some viewers might find any appreciation of ShyDevo’s Pot Girls to be politically fraught, depending on their particular life experiences and mindset.

It cannot be denied that ShyDevo’s peculiar science fiction fantasy of women being trapped in vases and used as sex toys takes place in the context of a society where the real-world objectification, abuse, and enslavement of women is disturbingly commonplace. I do not think that this particular artist’s smut is necessarily indicative of his political leanings. Nor do I think that fantasy art (particularly pornography) always needs to model ethical real-world behaviour. But I also understand why this is a touchy subject. After all, our culture’s treatment of women has eroded considerably in last few decades. America’s descent into mask-off fascism has been accompanied by a drastic rollback of women’s reproductive rights, along with the rise of misogynistic tradwife/manosphere influencers. Very few of Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplices are likely to ever face meaningful punishment for their horrifying abuse of women and girls; this fact, alone, is a depressing barometer for the state of our culture at this moment in history. To the extent that reckoning with such cultural baggage is possible in a photography project, I have tried to keep these uncomfortable truths in mind as I created my own interpretation of Pot Girl art. Yet again, I draw attention to the human teeth which litter some of my images. These are badly decomposed—an echo of the broader cultural rot which surrounds us all.

Pot Girl with Flowers, Sheath, and Teeth