New Modality Contributor:
Midori, Artist and BDSM Educator
Midori is a multidisciplinary artist known for her interactive performances and installations, as well as a renowned sexuality educator and international presenter on personal fulfillment and kinky adventures. She's appeared at our event at The Battery (San Francisco) in 2020.
Could you talk a bit about your teaching and your art?
I’ve got a two-track career; on one there’s the art side, and on the other side there’s my teaching. In terms of teaching, I am the founder of a company, Fire Horse Productions, that creates sexuality, BDSM, and personal empowerment workshops. I am giving people the tools by which to better engage in creativity and personal expression. I use sexuality as a portal, a sandbox, a place where people experiment and learn about themselves, where all parties involved engage in mutual joy creation, where everybody is experiencing satisfaction. But before all this, there needs to be self-awareness — not just the technical stuff, the things people tend to immediately think of when hearing about BDSM — but rather understanding one’s desire, specificity of language in order that one may engage in effective, precise, relevant communication.
Even if learned in the realm of your bedroom, these skills permeate all aspects of one’s interaction with other people in the world. With my teaching, I’m sharing creativity and empowerment and how to do things better with other people. Sometimes it’s sex; sometimes it’s kink. Sometimes it’s painting a mural; sometimes it’s your next software release. Sometimes it’s just making a better world.
“I use sexuality as a portal, a sandbox, a place where people experiment and learn about themselves as well as cocreate joy.”
What are some of your own favorite past projects? Why do you feel great about them?
My art is where I’m engaging in that creativity for myself, engaging in the personal expression. A lot of my artwork is socially engaged. A lot of is immersive and experiential. I have an installation up right now that’s available by private viewing and appointment only, called "In the Pines." It's an Edwardian-era room, and once you walk in, you are immersed in a forest made of tightly woven and seemingly chaotic rope; in the middle of the forest is a wooden swing. It creates this beautiful immersive experience that has a visual, tactile, emotional, olfactory aspect. And people can climb and interact with it.
Another piece of mine, a huge sculpture of mine, called InVocation, is going up at the Open Society Foundation in New York City; the opening night is on March 9th, 2020, and then it’s up for a week in conjunction with the UN Commission on the Status of Women. I created this sculpture whereupon I received objects from current or past queer sex workers, treating the objects like totemic items of memory and artifacts of labor.
I’ve also done a piece called The Dining Room where the public is invited to break dishes with me and I take the broken fragments and create a sculpture. The effect ends up looking like a shag carpet from a distance, on top of which there’s this dining table with place settings and four seats; it looks like a dining room until you see that the carpet is made of glass shards and the plates on the table are reconstructed broken plates.
What’s a specific project that you’re excited about right now?
I teach ForteFemme, a nine-person weekend intensive, about every other month or so. During the weekend, we dive in to create excellent communication skills and an understanding in others in order to create joy. We are getting a lot of students from high level IT and financial / technology industries; here are amazing, highly accomplished women, confident in their own field, yet in their own realm of sexuality they are just voicing their own desire. They may come from uncertainty, old cultural baggage — or they may come from wanting creativity and not wanting to go to some of the garbage that’s available online, believing and knowing that in their gut that there's a passionate and compassionate way to engage in kinky fun. What I find exciting is that so many powerful women are showing up, already we have an amazing alumna group.
What are your favorite links that will help our audience learn about you, your life, your work, and your values?
You can learn more about me, Fire Horse Productions, and so on at PlanetMidori.com.
Transparency Notes
This profile was edited by Michael J. Seidlinger, print and digital producer of The New Modality.