‘Crimes against nature’ – Shayli Harrisson
Last year, Shayli took a year off to experience her roots again. This collection designed by Aussie girl Shayli Harrison is based on her life in Western Australia. Growing up surrounded by the native bush-land near the ocean, she would travel around with her family to visit national parks and go fishing. Something Shayli really missed when she came to Antwerp. Yet, all of this inspiration lead to Shayli discovering an exhibition that friends of hers, Loren Kronemyer and Ian Sinclair put together, named Ecosexual Bathhouse.
Shayli first learned about the idea of ecosexuality through the Ecosex Manifesto by Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens.
“It’s about treating nature as your lover. Or looking at what you and nature have as a relationship. Perhaps, in that way, if we see it as something reciprocal, then we might stop abusing it. Just viewing the environment as another living entity, which you can take as far as you want. Some ecosexuals perform marriage rituals with the dirt, the ocean or the sun, for some it is very much a kink and for others it is simply a filter through which they view their relationship with the environment. For this collection I created a character that embodied my own love affair with nature: she is an Australian, white-trash goddess with a fetish for mother earth.”