Hyojae Kim
Burning Shell: Fetishism as a Practice of Care

Preface

“To touch what is hidden is not to expose it, but to care for it.”

At the heart of this project lies the pursuit of self-possession—not as a fixed claim over the body, but as a tactile, sensorial, and erotic unveiling.
Burning Shell: Fetishism as a Practice of Care begins by reconfiguring fetishism not as a symptom cast in the shadows of pathology and deviance, but as a method of “Care”: a practice of staying with what is too much, too quiet, too often unseen.

This research engages with Victorian secrecy, enigmatic objects, and nineteenth-century drawing and photography, not merely as archive but as atmosphere. Figures such as Mistress Theresa Berkley (d. 1836), the inventor of BDSM apparatus, and Hannah Cullwick (1833–1909), a lower servant who wrote her eros into the seams of class and skin, move through works such as Kissing Belt (2024-5), My Shell Is Burning (2025), and Dear the John I–III (2024) as both phantoms and anchors.

The project unfolds through three interwoven studies—Dressing Case, Writing Case, and The Secret Drawer—each shaped like a breath, a wound, a whisper.
Within them, objects of containment—belts, knives, diaries, ropes—are reimagined not as tools of silence, but as vessels of Care.
Not to confine, but to hold.
Not to erase, but to structure.

Here, fetishism is not illness, but a form of care : a touch soft as the skin of memory, burning desire, tracing the ashes of absence.
Through my research journey of Care, Burning Shell asks:
What if to fetishize is to tend to what exceeds speech— to stay with it, not through explanation, but through presence.

This is not a project that examines fetishism from a distance;
it moves within its gestures and textures.
As both artist and researcher, I do not interpret fetishism—I enact it through ritual, repetition, and form.
The works I produce—metal belts, knotted ropes, engraved texts—are not illustrations of theory, but thinking-objects:
physical sites where memory, care, and fracture converge.

This is not a practice of solving.
It is a practice of staying—with discomfort, with beauty, with care.

To touch what is hidden is not to reveal, but to remain close.
To linger in the ash, in the after-image, in what resists being named.
The archive here is not evidence, but echo—not a container of truth, but a haunt of feeling.
Each case enacts a ritual of incomplete knowing.
Objects slide instead of declare.
Care is not clarity, but proximity—in blurred boundaries, in soft persistence.

Burning Shell is the practice of holding what burns—
not to extinguish the flame,
but to stay warm beside it.

This is not a study in resolution.
It is a composition in fragments.
A choreography of concealment.
An archive not of clarity—but of affect.
Of ash that still remembers flame.

To work with fetish is to work with what remains.
To trace the outline of what flickers.
These case studies, like the bodies they conjure, appear, vanish, and return.
They do not conclude.
But they care.

This is a methodology of ritual,
of intimate objects,
of unspeakable gestures.
A practice of remaining—
with what binds, bruises, and burns.

Care and Cruelty
Refiguring Fetishism as Methodology

This research begins with a question that is both intimate and theoretical:
How can fetishism be understood not as pathology, but as a methodology of care?
Burning Shell: Fetishism as a Practice of Care proposes that fetishism—commonly marginalized as deviant, excessive, or symptomatic—can be refigured as a relational and affective practice. Through this lens, acts of bodily restraint, ritualized object relations, and aesthetic concealment are no longer read as dysfunctional, but as forms of attention, archiving, and survival.

This thesis is grounded in practice-based research, drawing from my visual works, speculative object-making, auto-theoretical writing, and archival interventions. The project engages the intersection of affect theory, feminist ethics of care, queer fetish cultures, and Victorian sexuality, examining how bodies negotiate visibility and power through constraint, repetition, and erotic materiality.

Victorian history provides both the archival foundation and conceptual terrain of the research. The nineteenth century marked a pivotal shift in how sexuality was recorded and regulated—most notably through medical texts such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). However, this project does not aim to recover “lost” subjects in a restorative sense. Instead, it focuses on affective remainders—traces, gestures, and partial inscriptions that resist assimilation into normative archival legibility. Central historical figures such as Theresa Berkley and Hannah Cullwick are approached not as case studies to be explained, but as collaborators in a speculative, trans-temporal archive of care and constraint.

The research unfolds through three interlinked “case studies”:

• Dressing Case investigates the politics of erotic restraint through the figure of Berkley and the speculative object Kissing Belt (2025);
  
  
• Writing Case explores language, fetish, and repetition via Hannah Cullwick’s diaries and the creation of My Shell Is Burning (2024) and Dear the John I–III (2024);
  
  
• The Secret Drawer considers therapeutic performance, archival silence, and the erotics of fragment through contemporary workshop-based practices and affective assemblages.
  
  

Methodologically, this project refuses linear narrative and instead embraces what I call “archival affect”—a mode of working that prioritizes partiality, material intimacy, and emotional resonance. Theory and art-making are not positioned hierarchically but operate together to produce a fragmented, layered, and sensorial form of research.

Ultimately, this thesis seeks not to define fetishism, but to stay with it—to dwell in its complexity, its ambivalence, and its creative potential. It argues that fetishism, when approached through care, becomes a tool of self-possession, a language of resistance, and an archive of what the body dares to remember.