Alexandra Potter

Some sessions document what happens to the person inside the bear. This one documented what happens around it.

Alexandra Potter came to shoot with Xay One not as an observer but as a collaborator. She understood the concept immediately; a living teddy bear she could interact with, direct, position, and walk alongside. The fact that inside was a person sealed away from every sense only made the dynamic more compelling to her. She treated the bear as hers.

But before Alexandra arrived on set, Mary was already deep inside.

The session lasted eight hours. A full working day spent enclosed in latex, gagged, deaf, blind, breathing through nasal tubes, with no knowledge of where she was, who was in the room, or when it would end. She was transported, positioned, and moved between locations without any context. Every push, every shuffle, every change of direction came without warning and without explanation. Her world was reduced to the pressure of hands guiding her and the rhythm of her own breathing.

Eight hours is not endurance in the usual sense. It is a psychological landscape. Mary later described the experience as one where her mind cycled through phases: focus, disorientation, fear, calm, then back again. Not knowing where she was became its own form of isolation on top of the physical one. She could feel the presence of people around her but could not identify them, could not tell if it was one person or several, could not distinguish intention from accident. Every touch carried weight because she had no way to anticipate or interpret it.

Being pushed and guided for that duration changed something in her. The helplessness was no longer a temporary state she was enduring; it became the condition she inhabited. Her body stopped resisting. Her mind stopped tracking time. She existed inside the bear the way the bear existed in the room; present, passive, and entirely at the mercy of whoever was directing the scene.

Alexandra made the most of it. She directed the bear through a series of interactions; walking together through the space, posing side by side, moments of closeness that read as playful from the outside but carried an entirely different weight for the person inside. Her ballet heels clicked against concrete while the bear shuffled silently beside her. The contrast between Alexandra’s visibility and freedom and Mary’s total confinement within the same frame became the visual engine of the session.

The shoot produced both photography and video. The footage captures their interaction in real time; Alexandra leading, adjusting, occasionally leaning into the bear with a familiarity that makes the viewer forget what is hidden inside. Or perhaps it makes them remember. That tension between the casual and the extreme is what defines the material from this session.

When it was over, Mary did not want to come out. After eight hours sealed inside, after being moved through a full production day as an object, after losing all sense of time and place, the enclosure had become more familiar than the outside. Removing the costume was not a relief. It was an interruption.

That reaction said more about where Xay One had arrived than any image from the session. The bear had become a space someone did not want to leave. The project had crossed a line that no amount of planning could have predicted; from something someone endures to something someone chooses to stay inside, even when the choice to leave is finally offered.

Raymond K. Larum