About our team
The folk behind the Darling Darling project
‘Darling Darling is a sex worker-led creative project inviting sex workers, former workers, and clients to share their stories through art. Explore Storytelling, Photography and Sculpture, to transform lived experience into creative works that humanise sex work, challenge stigma, and foster connection. No creative experience is needed — everyone’s voice matters.’
Storytelling, for us, is a way to transform understanding. By sharing the voices, experiences, and creative expressions of sex workers, we reveal the humanity, normality, and everyday realities of this essential work — challenging stigma, fostering empathy. Based in Muloobinba (Newcastle), NSW, our small, passionate team brings together sex workers, allies, and creatives committed to cultural change. This is our first project as a collective and our first working directly with our peers — building something grounded in trust, care, and collaboration.
We honour the many phenomenal face-in workers contributing to Darling Darling whose names and faces remain private, their presence deeply felt. As we grow, this project will evolve with you — your stories, your art, your truths. Together, we’re creating a constellation of voices that reframe how sex work is seen and understood.
-
She/They
Writer + Sexologist
https://sexistentialism.substack.com
Jayne McCartney is a writer, sexologist, and interrogator of intimacy. With a journalist’s instinct for untold stories and a sex educator’s commitment to breaking taboos, she brings both rigour and rebellion to conversations about sex, power, and the ways we connect.
Her work explores the raw, messy, and deeply human realities of sex and desire, from the fallout of dating apps and the role of gendered norms to the complexities of polyamory, age-gap relation-ships, and the philosophical and real-world experiences of human sexuality.
Whether on the page, in the classroom, or in deep, curious conversations, Jayne is dedicated to breaking open the mysteries of who we become in the longing, the risk, and the rawness of human connection.
-
She/Her
https://www.drhilary-sexologist.com/
Dr Hilary Caldwell is a sex worker, author, academic, sexologist, and long-time advocate for gender justice. With a doctorate on women who buy sex and over two decades of professional experience, Hilary brings fierce intelligence, lived experience, and clarity to public conversations about pleasure, power, and consent.
Hilary is co-facilitating writing workshops and guiding our peer engagement and advocacy campaign.
-
She/Her
Your Body Raw - Photographer
https://www.leeillfieldphotographer.com/
Lee is a photographer, storyteller, and alchemist of human connection.
With an instinct for joy and a gift for capturing the magic in the everyday, she doesn’t just take photos—she creates spaces where people feel safe enough to be seen. Her lens finds the raw, the radiant, the unguarded moments that speak louder than words.
A natural connector, she builds trust as effortlessly as she composes a shot, holding space for her subjects to show up as their most honest selves. Whether behind the camera or bringing people together, her work is a celebration of presence, intimacy, and the beauty of being unapologetically real.
-
He/Him
Technical and Multimedia Artist
Jarod is a multimedia artist who has a love of light, movement and human stories. He has a diverse practice spanning photography, animation, special effects, augmented reality, installation and live performance.Having worked across the commercial, established and independent art worlds both in Australia and abroad, he finds a particular joy in collaboration and working with others to explore new and unexpected visions
-
Our face-in peers, are integral to Darling Darling, and shape the project direction, the way we communicate to our partners and participants and the artistic intent!
As workers both former and current, their ongoing lived experience of stigma deeply informs the importance of Darling Darling.