About Xay One
The story behind the work — where it comes from, what drives it, and why latex.
Xay One began in 2020 as something no one expected to become today. The original concept was direct: an oversized teddy bear with a living figure sealed inside. Mary Shields was the first to step into that role, and her courage set the foundation for everything that followed. She endured full sensory deprivation in a latex cocoon; deaf, blind, gagged, breathing only through nasal tubes, her body locked into the costume for hours at a time. Her willingness to push through discomfort and disorientation gave the project its earliest emotional vocabulary: pure surrender, pure endurance, the body reduced to presence alone. When Mary chose to step away to focus on her family and career, she left behind a body of work that proved the concept was more than a provocation. It was art that demanded something real from the person inside.
In 2025, Evie Fayé entered the project and did not simply continue it. She changed its internal mechanics entirely.
Evie brought with her a lifetime of classical ballet training, begun at the age of three. That background is not decorative. Ballet is control refined to the point of invisibility; every position earned, every movement governed by rules, angles, and expectation. That discipline aligns with Xay One’s core idea in a way that had not existed before: surrender is not passive. It is practiced. Where Mary’s sessions were defined by resistance and raw endurance, Evie introduced something new: precision, conscious body awareness, and trained physical intelligence. Breathing, balance, tension, recovery. These are not abstract concepts for her. They are trained responses. Inside latex, inside restraint, this changes everything. The body no longer only endures. It adapts.
Evie also brought her existing work as the Latex Ballerina, where she already navigated the intersection of art production, bondage, latex, and ballet heels. That combination unlocked dimensions of Xay One that had not been possible before. Her ability to walk in ballet heels is not a novelty or a provocation. It is a functional extension of balance, posture, and discipline. Ballet Heels demand complete recalibration of gravity, forcing the body into a constant state of correction. Within Xay One, they become less an object and more a constraint that moves. The figure is no longer purely static. Motion enters the frame, but motion under pressure. Walking becomes labor. Standing becomes effort. Control becomes visible again, not as authority, but as tension held together by training.
As a photographer, videographer, and creative director, I guide Evie through every session. Her transformation begins with encasement in a full-body latex catsuit, followed by a mask secured with a tight collar that seals away sight, hearing, and speech. Nasal tubes become her only lifeline. Her hands disappear into thick gloves, her feet are layered in toe socks and forced into ballet heels beneath the costume, and her limbs are locked with arm and ankle cuffs. In extended sessions, ropes may further reduce her to stillness. Once the bear closes around her, Evie ceases to exist as herself.
In this context, latex stops being a shell and becomes a second skin that records everything. Every micro-adjustment. Every tremor. Every correction her body makes to remain upright, aligned, and present. With Evie, latex does not erase individuality. It documents discipline.
Every production day is a negotiation between care and intensity. Evie’s safety is the non-negotiable foundation; I monitor her continuously, maintain physical proximity at all times, and rely on a tactile communication system that allows her to signal from within despite complete sensory deprivation. But safety does not mean comfort. The project lives in the space where vulnerability is real, where the confinement is genuine, and where the trust between us becomes visible in every frame.
What has shifted is the emotional center of the work. Xay One moves from pure captivity toward structured submission. From silence toward internal focus. From helplessness toward controlled limitation. The contrast remains central: softness versus restriction, elegance versus confinement, the familiar versus the unsettling. But now, these contrasts are carried by a body trained to negotiate extremes. A body that understands restraint is not the opposite of expression but one of its most precise forms.
Mary Shields gave Xay One its beginning. Evie Fayé is giving it direction, movement, and a future the project could not have reached without her.
Raymond K. Larum
In 2025, Evie Fayé entered the project and did not simply continue it. She changed its internal mechanics entirely.
Evie brought with her a lifetime of classical ballet training, begun at the age of three. That background is not decorative. Ballet is control refined to the point of invisibility; every position earned, every movement governed by rules, angles, and expectation. That discipline aligns with Xay One’s core idea in a way that had not existed before: surrender is not passive. It is practiced. Where Mary’s sessions were defined by resistance and raw endurance, Evie introduced something new: precision, conscious body awareness, and trained physical intelligence. Breathing, balance, tension, recovery. These are not abstract concepts for her. They are trained responses. Inside latex, inside restraint, this changes everything. The body no longer only endures. It adapts.
Evie also brought her existing work as the Latex Ballerina, where she already navigated the intersection of art production, bondage, latex, and ballet heels. That combination unlocked dimensions of Xay One that had not been possible before. Her ability to walk in ballet heels is not a novelty or a provocation. It is a functional extension of balance, posture, and discipline. Ballet Heels demand complete recalibration of gravity, forcing the body into a constant state of correction. Within Xay One, they become less an object and more a constraint that moves. The figure is no longer purely static. Motion enters the frame, but motion under pressure. Walking becomes labor. Standing becomes effort. Control becomes visible again, not as authority, but as tension held together by training.
As a photographer, videographer, and creative director, I guide Evie through every session. Her transformation begins with encasement in a full-body latex catsuit, followed by a mask secured with a tight collar that seals away sight, hearing, and speech. Nasal tubes become her only lifeline. Her hands disappear into thick gloves, her feet are layered in toe socks and forced into ballet heels beneath the costume, and her limbs are locked with arm and ankle cuffs. In extended sessions, ropes may further reduce her to stillness. Once the bear closes around her, Evie ceases to exist as herself.
In this context, latex stops being a shell and becomes a second skin that records everything. Every micro-adjustment. Every tremor. Every correction her body makes to remain upright, aligned, and present. With Evie, latex does not erase individuality. It documents discipline.
Every production day is a negotiation between care and intensity. Evie’s safety is the non-negotiable foundation; I monitor her continuously, maintain physical proximity at all times, and rely on a tactile communication system that allows her to signal from within despite complete sensory deprivation. But safety does not mean comfort. The project lives in the space where vulnerability is real, where the confinement is genuine, and where the trust between us becomes visible in every frame.
What has shifted is the emotional center of the work. Xay One moves from pure captivity toward structured submission. From silence toward internal focus. From helplessness toward controlled limitation. The contrast remains central: softness versus restriction, elegance versus confinement, the familiar versus the unsettling. But now, these contrasts are carried by a body trained to negotiate extremes. A body that understands restraint is not the opposite of expression but one of its most precise forms.
Mary Shields gave Xay One its beginning. Evie Fayé is giving it direction, movement, and a future the project could not have reached without her.
Raymond K. Larum
I knew what I was stepping into. I had seen the images from Mary Shields’ sessions, understood the concept, and recognized what it asked of the body and the mind. But knowing and experiencing are separated by a distance that no amount of preparation can close.
Encased in full-body black latex, I am stripped of identity and autonomy. The material clings to every contour of my body; tight, inescapable, a second skin that erases the first. The heavy collar locks around my neck, its weight pressing down as a constant reminder that I have given up control. The mask seals away everything: sight, sound, voice. Deep nasal tubes become my only connection to the outside world, narrowing my existence to the thin passage of air that keeps me conscious. My hands disappear into thick gloves, my feet are wrapped in toe socks and forced into ballet heels, and my limbs are secured with cuffs. Then the bear closes around me.
I stay, I walk, I stand; blind on my toes inside an oversized teddy bear whose soft exterior is the opposite of everything I feel within. Time dissolves. I have no clock, no light, no reference point. I do not know how long I have been here or how long remains. There is only the rhythm of my breathing and the awareness that Raymond is near, even when I cannot perceive him.
The physical demands are relentless. My calves burn from balancing on ballet heels without sight or spatial reference. My joints ache under the weight of the collar and cuffs. In bondage sessions, ropes hold me in fixed positions until my muscles tremble and then keep holding. But my body does not only resist. It adapts. I have been trained as a ballet dancer since I was three years old. Decades of that discipline live in my muscles, in my posture, in the way I instinctively redistribute weight when balance shifts. Ballet taught me that every position is earned, that control is not the absence of strain but the management of it. Pointe shoes taught me that suffering has structure. Ballet Heels, inside a latex cocoon inside a teddy bear, is the furthest extension of that lesson, but it follows the same logic: the body does not surrender to the constraint. It negotiates with it.
As the Latex Ballerina, I already work at the intersection of art, bondage, and ballet heels. Xay One takes that further than anything else I do. Inside the bear, there is no audience to perform for, no mirror to correct against, no music to count. There is no external feedback at all. Every adjustment I make is internal, guided by proprioception, by years of training my body to know where it is in space without seeing it. The latex records every one of those adjustments. Every micro-correction, every tremor, every shift of weight is visible on the surface. Nothing is hidden. Inside the bear, my discipline becomes the content.
The mental challenge runs deeper than the physical. Helpless and disoriented, I am alone with my own thoughts in a silence so complete it becomes loud. Fear surfaces, circles, fades, returns. Yet there is something paradoxical in this vulnerability: a strange safety in knowing that my helplessness is intentional, that Raymond is controlling every variable, that he would never leave my side. Even when I need to pause, even when exhaustion pulls me toward sleep while still sealed off from the world, his presence is the one thing I can trust without sensing it.
As the hours stretch on, I become less a person and more a living sculpture; a fusion of fragility and form, of discipline and dependence. The teddy bear becomes both a prison and a stage. I exist as two things at once: something soft and something sealed, something innocent and something confined. Every session strips away everything I used to define myself, leaving only what remains when identity is gone.
What remains is nothing. It is training. It is breath. It is the choice to stay.
I chose this. I choose it every time.
Evie Fayé
Encased in full-body black latex, I am stripped of identity and autonomy. The material clings to every contour of my body; tight, inescapable, a second skin that erases the first. The heavy collar locks around my neck, its weight pressing down as a constant reminder that I have given up control. The mask seals away everything: sight, sound, voice. Deep nasal tubes become my only connection to the outside world, narrowing my existence to the thin passage of air that keeps me conscious. My hands disappear into thick gloves, my feet are wrapped in toe socks and forced into ballet heels, and my limbs are secured with cuffs. Then the bear closes around me.
I stay, I walk, I stand; blind on my toes inside an oversized teddy bear whose soft exterior is the opposite of everything I feel within. Time dissolves. I have no clock, no light, no reference point. I do not know how long I have been here or how long remains. There is only the rhythm of my breathing and the awareness that Raymond is near, even when I cannot perceive him.
The physical demands are relentless. My calves burn from balancing on ballet heels without sight or spatial reference. My joints ache under the weight of the collar and cuffs. In bondage sessions, ropes hold me in fixed positions until my muscles tremble and then keep holding. But my body does not only resist. It adapts. I have been trained as a ballet dancer since I was three years old. Decades of that discipline live in my muscles, in my posture, in the way I instinctively redistribute weight when balance shifts. Ballet taught me that every position is earned, that control is not the absence of strain but the management of it. Pointe shoes taught me that suffering has structure. Ballet Heels, inside a latex cocoon inside a teddy bear, is the furthest extension of that lesson, but it follows the same logic: the body does not surrender to the constraint. It negotiates with it.
As the Latex Ballerina, I already work at the intersection of art, bondage, and ballet heels. Xay One takes that further than anything else I do. Inside the bear, there is no audience to perform for, no mirror to correct against, no music to count. There is no external feedback at all. Every adjustment I make is internal, guided by proprioception, by years of training my body to know where it is in space without seeing it. The latex records every one of those adjustments. Every micro-correction, every tremor, every shift of weight is visible on the surface. Nothing is hidden. Inside the bear, my discipline becomes the content.
The mental challenge runs deeper than the physical. Helpless and disoriented, I am alone with my own thoughts in a silence so complete it becomes loud. Fear surfaces, circles, fades, returns. Yet there is something paradoxical in this vulnerability: a strange safety in knowing that my helplessness is intentional, that Raymond is controlling every variable, that he would never leave my side. Even when I need to pause, even when exhaustion pulls me toward sleep while still sealed off from the world, his presence is the one thing I can trust without sensing it.
As the hours stretch on, I become less a person and more a living sculpture; a fusion of fragility and form, of discipline and dependence. The teddy bear becomes both a prison and a stage. I exist as two things at once: something soft and something sealed, something innocent and something confined. Every session strips away everything I used to define myself, leaving only what remains when identity is gone.
What remains is nothing. It is training. It is breath. It is the choice to stay.
I chose this. I choose it every time.
Evie Fayé
Every shoot is a collaboration — between the photographer, the model, the material, and the light. Each album tells a story of its own, and none of them were planned to be part of a series.
The technical craft matters as much as the vision. Lighting, post-production, and equipment are where the effort goes — because the material itself demands precision to be rendered faithfully on screen.
Members get access to the full archive — high-resolution photography, exclusive video, and behind-the-scenes material. Join and see what happens when fashion meets art.
Xay One Creators
We Are
The two people behind every album — one in front of the camera, one behind it.
Raymond K. Larum
Editor & Photographer
Evie Fayé
Living Insert & Rubber Doll