Sketch from the East London Stripper Collective’s life drawing session in May by artist Jean-David Solon (image courtesy the artist)LONDON and BRIGHTON, England — Almost two decades ago, Stacey Clare began stripping to make ends meet. An environmental arts student at the Glasgow School of Art at the time, she was from a working-class background in the North of England and was fascinated by both fine arts and sex work — and how the two overlapped. The films and performance art of Annie Sprinkle and the activism and art of The Scarlot Harlot were two of her primary inspirations as an artist and as a sex worker. After attending dynamic life drawing classes and specializing in performance arts, Clare proposed a stripper life drawing class as a course project to her professor. The idea was met with profound interest from students and Glasgow’s art scene.“By the end of my degree, I had made a working peep show with a coin machine,” she explained to Hyperallergic in an interview at a pub in Brighton, recounting how her art practice and sex work quickly merged. “I was doing things that my tutors kind of hated — they were like, ‘Is this art? Are you not just reproducing porn, sexualized performing, stripping?’ And I was like, ‘How is that not art?’”Poster for the May 2 “ASK A STRIPPER: Pulling Back The G-String” event at Brighton Fringe, featuring Stacey Clare (left) and Sabrina Jade (right) (image courtesy Stacey Clare)Sabrina Jade, a sex worker, performer, and media personality in Brighton who performs a comedy show with Clare called Ask a Stripper at the Brighton Fringe, echoes Clare’s observations about the isolation of sex workers.“Organizing can be very difficult because of whorephobia. A lot of people won’t think of themselves as sex workers even if they’re subjected to the same licensing and stigma as us,” Jade told Hyperallergic. But, like Clare, she repeats how necessary community organizing is: ‘‘Because our job is unsociable hours, organizing is often quite difficult, even though it’s necessary to create community for us.” In 2012, while working as a stripper in East London, Clare decided to revisit stripper life drawing using a small room on the upper floor of the White Horse, an infamous, now-shuttered club in Hackney. One year later, the life drawing class had evolved into the East London Stripper Collective (ELSC), a sex worker-led organizing body that advocates for sex worker rights and hosts regular stripper life drawing sessions. A 2020 life drawing session at the Crown and Shuttle with model and pole dancer Tequila Rose Anderson Bate (photo courtesy Stacey Clare)At the Crown and Shuttle pub on May 12, the ELSC held a life drawing session in which participants were invited to charcoal the movements of pole dancer and teacher NK Pole. In a small room on the second floor, NK floated above the artists, holding mid-air poses for several minutes at a time. Participants with sketchpads on their laps or on easels they brought from home circled around the pole, furiously sketching as songs by Cardi B and Ginuwine played in the background.The ELSC — including Clare and her co-organizers, Samantha Sun, Maddie Sexxxy, Izzy Mac, and Glam Clam — defines stripper life drawing “as a natural progression from the age-old practice of hiring professional harlots and hussies as models for art.” The models for the ELSC drawing events are sex workers from London and elsewhere, including Sabrina Jade. The line between sex work and art is arbitrary and non-existent, they explain, and the attendees are both artists and consumers of sex work. May life drawing session participant Roger (photo Laura O’Connor/Hyperallergic)“[Attendees] are participants — the act of looking or seeing is an act of consumption,” Clare said. “You can’t hide behind the identity of ‘you’re here as an artist’ and don’t want anything to do with the sex industry. We promote the class as 100% run by sex workers. This is a celebration of our culture. You’re a guest invited into our space.”The ELSC’s life drawing classes have garnered significant attention in the local arts scene, becoming something of an institution in the area. The classes are usually held at least once a month, with over 20 artists in attendance. The life drawing models are all current or former sex workers, and from its beginnings, most of the session’s attendees are seasoned artists. “We didn’t have a hard time getting people to understand our vision,” explained Clare. But the classes have also allowed the ELSC to thrive as an organizing collective. “[ELSC] has found a way to circumvent SWERFs, because we’re claiming our power back in no uncertain terms,” Clare continued. “We’re the protagonists, we’re the muse and the artists. No one can question the validity of what we’re doing — we become object and subject.” Patricia Cervantes, age 30, an attendee of the life drawing classes, was initially interested in the ELSC because of its expressly political values. Patricia Cervantes with her sketches from May’s session (photo Laura O’Connor/Hyperallergic)“I’ve always admired the sheer cuntiness of sex workers, their confidence, the attitude, the way they take up space. It’s powerful, and society is missing out on that self-freedom,” she told Hyperallergic. “Sadly, sex workers have been part of art forever, but mostly as subjects seen through the eyes of others. In the life drawing, they get to reclaim that, and I love it.” Cervantes is part of a group of life drawing attendees who are drawn to the initiative’s solidarity with sex worker liberation, in addition to the opportunity it presents to hone their artistic craft.When asked if she conceives of herself as an artist, though the answer is clear with regard to her performance art, Clare replied, “I don’t draw and paint, I’m a facilitator — I’m an organizer.” And in an organizing capacity, the intersections of sex work and art are significant: Workers’ rights are still sorely lacking in both fields. “Society has a hard time understanding sex work as work, just as they have a hard time understanding or accepting art as work, and artists and sex workers and workers,” Clare added.Participating artist Jean-David Solon’s digital sketches (image courtesy the artist)Despite the pushback Clare faced earlier in her career, the life drawing classes have largely been met with little resistance. “In London, we’ve never had a problem with people understanding us as artists,” she explained. Speaking to some of the attendees in the class in May, this was immediately evident: The participants, many of whom were cis men, were invested, working profusely to capture NK’s sculptural poses as eight-inch heels soared above her head. “When you don’t have much time, you have to focus on what matters most,” said Jean-David Solon, a London-based concept artist who has worked on films in the Star Wars and Jurassic Park franchises, among others. “ELSC is a fun environment to practice. The variety of poses, the accessories, and the extremely short poses make this experience both challenging and fun.”A sketch by Jean-David Solon (image courtesy the artist)Though life drawing participants have been largely receptive to the ELSC, the bulk of the backlash has come from fine art institutions. Clare recounts one life drawing session slated for the Royal Academy of Arts in 2016, in which the venue insisted that stripper life drawing would cause legal issues. The ELSC organizers self-advocated and educated the venue on the legality of the event, which ultimately went ahead without a hitch.“We were like, the laws are crystal clear — we are allowed to do this because this is what it is in an art context — it’s not sexual entertainment,” Clare explained, citing the UK Police and Crime Act’s definition of sexual entertainment as an act with the sole or principal purpose of “sexual stimulation.” The Royal Academy did not respond to Hyperallergic’s requests for comment.“When we try to take total control of our narrative, people go crazy. I’ve seen it more the higher up we climb in the art world,” continued Clare. “It’s not the poor artists that do this. It’s the curators, commissioners, the people in charge of artists, who don’t want anything to hurt their brand. And that’s fucking boring.”