Darya Diamond

“To care is not about letting an object go but holding on to an object by letting oneself go, giving oneself over to something that is not one’s own.”

―Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press, 2010, p.

Tender Revelation is exposure as echo, humility, and devotion circling each other in the aftermath. Sensitivity recoils, then returns; generosity stains what is left behind, residue that cannot be retrieved. The gap between experience and memento is forensic, raw, and unflinching. The body is not a passive medium.[1]

Diamond’s inquiry is lived, not abstract; it unfolds through the shifting terrain of hotel rooms and her London home. Six works surface from these landscapes, each a remnant, a trace. Across media, Diamond collects the residue of encounters while testing the limits of labor and its aftermath.

Diamond’s profession is a direct demonstration of the relational effects of intimacy and its radical potential, suggesting that transcendence arises from presence, shared breath, and emotional attunement, where transactional intimacy becomes restorative, comforting, and transformative. The artist’s body surfaces as a site where control, power, and vulnerability are all at stake. The anchor is unstable, the ground shifting. Techniques probe reflexive identity and implicate whoever might be looking. Roles shift, and relational dynamics remain open-ended.

Central to this series is the concept of co-regulation, a process of mutual emotional and psychological influence, which runs throughout the exhibition. For Diamond, it serves as a lens for understanding intimacy that transcends the transactional. The works reveal that vulnerability and connection occur not in isolation, but in the charged space between bodies, where boundaries are negotiated, and tenderness is an intentional exchange.

Tenderness is a shield and a sanctuary, a language that gestures toward the divine. Care is mapped at its edges—unseen labor, affect, transaction. Power, support, control, comfort: these forces intersect in private, porous moments, their residue embedded in silk screen, block print, soap, latex, cotton, bedsheets marked by encounter.

Materiality is unstable. The site stains, absorbs, and memory are woven into the fiber. Bedsheets from hotels and home, altered by block print and silk-screened stills, pornographic fragments. Each work is named for its origin: stark white cotton, Premiere Inn; crisp blue, 13 Gairloch Road. Anatomy and fabric double as setting and script, monuments to choreography that lingers in the mind. Tattoos surface as relics, performance, and labor etched over time. The body is a workplace, transaction, living archive.

Historically, windows in sex work have served as thresholds, managing negotiation, visibility, and risk. The piece I am quiet in your eyes marks a literal and figurative threshold. Cast initially from one of her former apartments, where she would also see clients, Diamond cites the paned window as artifice; a space best described as both sanctuary and site of care, where she would tend to emotion and psychological hygiene. This window mediates connection through light and partial revelation, evoking co-regulation and distance.

Sculptural forms, made bulbous and impermanent, cast from a mid-century hotel lamp, embody the essence and importance of ritual, cleansing, and impermanence. These soap works, such as Custard Heart, evoke transformation and illustrate the ways vulnerability emerges through relationships with others. By drawing attention to the more candid moments of her inner and outer life, the encounters that shape daily reality, Diamond questions how the body, its labor, and the pursuit of intimacy are continually subject to transcription and regulation. The formal use of repetition, casting, and collage allows for these methods to echo and accumulate, and look into the margins.

Fragility, translucency—threaded through the series. Revelation and exposure hover at the edge. Diamond moves between literal and figurative reproduction, testing the limits of paid intimacy, labor that slips from view. Reproduction persists. Images iterate, insist: someone was here. Lucid, patterned reminders, exchange made visible.

1 - Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.