Artist and printmaker Shelly Dyer-Gibbins grew up in the south-west of England where, she says, “anything deemed different, with an ‘edge’, and that wasn’t sensible and safe” was always frowned upon.

“Even becoming a ‘normal artist’ — whatever that means — had its drawbacks,” she explains. “I found there always seemed to be a real ‘battle’ of forces between artists then and now… open calls, awards etc, general rivalry… it was exhausting.”

But since venturing into the world of fetish and kink, she has found that “rejecting the constraints of societal norms and embracing the unconventional” has been “a more liberating and fulfilling” artistic experience. “Maybe more so as a female artist trying to break away from vanilla,” she thinks.

Shelley, who worked as a graphic artist in London for many years before moving to Somerset to work both as an artist and creative workshop tutor, says she has the sense that only a scattering of female artists are pushing themselves up through the ranks of fetish art.

This, she points out, is in stark contrast to the genre’s numerous earlier male exponents, among whom she counts American artist Charles Guyette, Italian illustrator and comics artist Roberto Baldazzini and American illustrator and tattooist Patrick Conlon to name but a few.

ROYAL ASSENT: HRH Princess Michael of Kent with Shelley’s Throat artwork at Mall Galleries’ Society of Women Artists exhibition, 2023

Shelley Dyer-Gibbins feels her early artist career has “seemed relatively successful”. She won the National Open Art Print Prize in 2017, followed by these other milestones:

VAO (Visual Art Open) Exhibition & Awards 2018
National Original Print Exhibition, Bankside Gallery, London 2019
Upfest Street Art Festival, Bristol 2022
EVAC (East Village Art Collection), NYC, USA 2022
Society of Women Artists, Mall Galleries, London, 2022 & 2023
Erotic Art London Exhibition, The Bargehouse, OXO Tower 2023 & publication.

But despite all this, she felt there was always something missing: “Lockdown gave me a huge shift of direction with an artwork called Night In — a linocut featuring heels and stockings that sold well within the mainstream, as staying in was the new ‘going out’.