Guest blog by Abbie Paramor who received a Revoluton Arts Kickstarter Mini Commission grant in February 2019.

SEX! PORN! PAINT! Great, now that I have caught your attention …

Hello! My name is Abbie Paramor and I’m an artist who just happens to have created a brand of paint inspired by porn.

Are you still with me? Wonderful!

Back in 2016, I graduated from the University of Bedfordshire with a degree in Photography and Video Art, and I didn’t know what to do. This was the first time in three years that I was without a brief and I was creatively burned out.

Like most recent graduates I got myself a job and I spent copious amounts of time on social media.

Then one day while mindlessly scrolling through Facebook my attention was piqued by an article about pornography. The article broke down the viewing habits of people globally but what really interested me were the lists about what kind of pornography British people were watching. Turns out nothing too kinky — just your run-of-the-mill porn.

Not long after reading that article Pantone released their colour of 2016 and I instantly started thinking about porn.

Our ever-growing consumption of pornography has led to the consideration that it may be negatively impacting our sex lives and giving underage people a false sense of what real relationships are.

Porn is now so easily accessed that I found all of my images on a popular search engine, with each genre generating both soft- and hardcore pornographic images.

So has pornography become so mainstream that is could influence colours? What if porn could inspire our day-to-day lives? Has porn become so normalised that it could be commercialised and sold at my local B&Q?

That is when I came up with the idea to invent my own line of emulsion paints inspired by those top ten searches.

What followed were months of compiling pornographic film stills from 2016. Once this was done, I layered the images and before I knew it I had a commercially viable range of colours.

Once I had the paints and had promotional materials made, I hit a wall — a financial wall.

In order to create a realistic advertising campaign, I needed to use my photography skills. However, without the right lighting I was never going to achieve that.

So I put my paint cans away, until one day I found myself mindlessly scrolling through Facebook once more and I saw a call for local artists who needed funding. The Revoluton Arts Kickstart Mini Commission felt like a calling, like my project had come full circle. I needed to apply.

Weeks later I got a call from Revoluton Arts. Not only did they want to give me money to purchase professional studio lighting but they also wanted to give me one-to-one sessions with an arts producer.

For the first time since graduating from university, I felt like a legitimate artist. Someone wanted to invest in me and my weird porn ideas.

I started working harder than I had in years. I wanted to prove I was worth the investment.

I also had a newfound confidence that was boosted even more when I launched the project at Revoluton’s Kickstart Mini Commissions Creative Café. People I didn’t know came up to me and wanted to discuss my work, its origins and what was next. They wanted to know where they could buy my lesbian-inspired paint, ‘Gluck’.

It has been a few months now since the Kickstart Mini Commission came to an end and I’m still in regular contact with both the people at Revoluton Arts and the lovely people who were also given funding.

What I have learned from this experience is that I’m not crazy to have spent all that time locked in my room looking at porn.

But the most meaningful thing I have learned is that my art has a place in the world.

My art is unique and a little odd but I have found that people actually like that.

Find Abbie on:

• Facebook: @abbieparamorartist

Find out about the next round of Kickstarter funding

Want to find out as soon as the next round of Kickstarter Mini Commissions is announced?

Subscribe to our mailing list and we'll make sure you're the first to know.