Writing Intimacy: The Skinny Prize 2024

When we talk to the winner of The Skinny Prize this year, Samuel Temple, they are busy packing up their belongings in preparation to move from Glasgow to Brighton. Following their graduation from The Glasgow School of Art last year (an experience the artist describes as "four years of endurance creativity") Temple was selected to be included in the Royal Scottish Academy’s New Contemporaries exhibition this year. The Skinny selected the artist for their bold and unapologetically queer and intimate visual and written works, such as By the Bedside, a beautifully tender portrayal of queer intimacy, accompanied by a spectral, haunting soundtrack. Temple’s work feels particularly vital in the present moment, where queer and trans people in the UK find themselves in an increasingly hostile and precarious environment. With representations of LGBTQ+ lives and identities coming under attack in public and educational spaces – such as the banning of LGBTQ-themed books in public libraries following complaints from parents, as well as the UK government’s ban on puberty blockers for under-18s, you could be forgiven for thinking Britain was harking back to the days of Section 28 (legislation implemented by Thatcher’s Conservative government which banned the ‘promotion’ of any material deemed to represent LGBTQ+ identities).  

For RSA New Contemporaries, Temple presented a slightly tweaked version of By the Bedside, a film installation which they created for their undergraduate degree show at GSA. They tell me that the installation at the RSA was "a streamlined version of what I had installed at my graduation show, where I had devised a hanging system for three custom canvasses for projecting. I wanted the canvasses to be substantial in weight and thickness. But floating, like a memory. They hung in such a way you could only ever really see one screen at a time. You had to choose what screen to watch, but the audio filled the space."

The way that the artist captures bodies – bodies that are undulating, caressing, languishing – has an aching beauty and subtlety that is reminiscent of Baroque or Renaissance painting. This rich, delicate aesthetic is the result of the artist colour grading the footage "to resemble Dutch Golden Age paintings, with their shadows and richness." By the Bedside was made in close collaboration with Glasgow-based artist Grundvold. Temple tells me the process of making the film began when Grundvold "tweeted that they were looking for people to collaborate and film porn with and I replied… We quickly arranged a date to discuss our visual inspirations and exchange some loose ideas. I found our first encounter really quite interesting, like a date but not a date – we were devising a plan of how we were going to have sex in a really matter of fact way… We had a natural chemistry, the technicalities of the filming process became foreplay, and my insecurities dulled as soon as we started."

Like with many of Temple’s works, the stimulus for By the Bedside was a piece of writing from years before the film’s making: "The process began with ideas of memories and longing. I have a piece of writing from a previous relationship that I wanted to create a video for, so I made it into subtitles and edited the footage to that – letting parts of the poem dictate length between cuts and what clips go where… The film, which started off as a ‘fantasy’ about longing, had now become autobiographical." Temple created the accompanying audio experience organically and intuitively, recording violin scores in response to what they had filmed; "I find it much easier to edit when I have a sound or a score to edit alongside," they tell me. "So I took my violin into art school, pushed record on my phone and played to what I had created so far. I tried to mimic the touches and caresses in the film on the violin. It was the first time I ever really felt an instrument become an extension of self." The creating of the soundscape allowed them to ‘escape'… "from the obsessive editing process I had sunk into."

To accompany the installation, they created and printed two poems which were placed inside intricately hand-crafted envelopes – of which Temple made around a thousand. Writing is an integral part of the artist’s practice – but it is also something that is personal and private. Temple says that for them, sharing their writing with the world feels more revealing than showing their nude body on screen: “Despite my work featuring nudity and sex, it’s been the writing that I have felt the most exposed by. My writing is the most revealing part of my practice. I’d rather be naked than let anyone read my (unedited) diary. It really is the core, even if the writing goes unseen. It’s most likely that there will be a piece of writing somewhere that goes with the visuals I create."

Temple is candidly honest about the strange, unsettled period following graduation from art school – something many arts graduates will be all too familiar with. “To be honest, I’ve not set out to make work since graduating last year. I’ve taken my camera with me for walks and written in my diary. The post-art school burnout has really reduced me and my output to what feels like a shell of my former self… However, I have started rediscovering the joy I find from research and I’ve been looking into some obscure parts of queer history. I have been looking into the gay history of sailing and some tales of gender-queer sailors too. From this research, I’m in the early stages of beginning a new body of work with the aim of retelling queer narratives within a 19th century-inspired aesthetic.”

However, this period after art school has also given them time and space to pursue other things. One of these things has been "reaching out to people, either people with skills I don’t have or people I just want to get to know. Asking if we could create together, both for fun and to connect with potential collaborators. I’m starting off with reconnecting with my ‘music’, which always reminds me of my childhood in Shetland. So I’m arranging opera lessons and then getting together with a music producer. Finding ways to learn and create 'for free’ has been interesting. I guess the concern I’m looking into at the moment is connection, pushing myself to make connections and seeing what comes out when we start making work."

Reflecting on Temple’s practice, which is so deeply and richly intimate, I ask them what their sources of inspiration are. They tell me: "My lovers always seem to inspire me to make and stay creative, which seems fitting for my admiration of classic romanticism and my desire to make more beautiful porn. There is something about experiencing life and realising you have something worth sharing. This is something we all have. I find this ‘line’ of creativity to come the most naturally – it’s an extension of my diary, where trying to make sense of it is often the starting point… Trying to understand a breakup, trying to understand why I feel the way I do in the world I am in basically."