Being/s made visible
Rosie Priest on Edinburgh Art Festival 2026
Rosie Priest is an artist, writer and researcher based in Edinburgh.
Edinburgh Art Festival unfolds in venues across the city from 14 to 30 August 2026. Find out more: edinburghartfestival.com
Installation photo: Sadao Hasegawa, Carnal Desires.
Courtesy Edinburgh Art Festival.
The morning after the eclipse, there are still glasses scattered amongst the grass on either side of the path up Calton Hill, small pieces of cardboard, made briefly necessary by something enormous. For a few minutes the day before, thousands of people had gathered here and looked upwards together, protecting their eyes so that they could look directly at what we are ordinarily told not to. The discarded glasses, little remnants of a collective act of looking.
I’m thinking about looking, and the invitation to look, now.
Exploring some of this year's Edinburgh Art Festival exhibitions, I found myself returning to questions of intimacy: who we allow to see us, how we present ourselves to one another, what we reveal and what we keep private, but also another kind of intimacy. Something stretching outwards: the intimacy between our bodies and the earth, between our short lives and deep cosmic time, between ourselves and a universe that we are within and entirely made from.
At the opening of Del LaGrace Volcano’s Love Bites Back on Constitution Street, Del spoke about how remarkable it is that people want to be seen. Their photographs are full of that desire, queer bodies presenting themselves on their own terms, with joy, humour, grit and glamour, occupying (mainly) public space, (occasionally) domestic space, and (often) looking back at the camera. One photograph is particularly large and welcomes you to the space, close to human scale. A body that feels as though they might step out of the frame and into the room with you. Covered in goosebumps. Elsewhere you move closer, finding the creases and cracks of skin, hairs, folds, expressions: all the minute evidence of a body being a body.
Listening to Del talk and explore felt particularly affecting for me. I work with Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive, whose history reaches back to West & Wilde, the Edinburgh bookshop willing to stock Del's Love Bites when almost nobody else would. Standing there listening to them speak I felt the strange intimacy of queer history collapsing in on itself: an archive becoming a person speaking in front of me, a history I spend time caring for suddenly alive and laughing and talking about sex and photographs and the people they have loved. A queer elder insisting, as Del put it, “they cannot shut me up.”
Del also spoke about renewed consent and how their archive is not fixed because the people within it aren't fixed. They returned to their subjects prior to the show—friends, lovers, fellow activists, people with deep connections to Del—reconnecting asking again whether and how they want their images shown. A photograph might hold still but the person within it doesn't have to. I have been thinking about this intensely because recently someone I knew personally shared an intimate photograph of me with somebody else, without my consent. I contacted the person who had received it and they deleted it, but there is no real way to delete the feeling of having been looked at without choosing to be. When Del was speaking, I felt the stinging heat of near tears in my throat and behind my eyes and realised something I hadn't yet been able to articulate. The experience hasn't made me want to disappear, quite the opposite: sometimes I want to be seen, I want to make my body public, I want the pleasure and glamour (as Del describes it) of choosing how I am looked at and the person or people who get to see me.
Perhaps there is a difference between being visible and being made visible? This question followed me and coloured my thinking throughout the day.
Photo: Del LaGrace Volcano
Nearby at Custom Lane, Carnal Desires celebrates Sadao Hasegawa's homoerotic drawings and paintings, many small enough that they require you to approach them—bend towards them, allowing your physicality to become implicated in the act of looking. The closer you get, the stranger and more fantastical their world becomes. Hypermasculine bodies swollen almost beyond possibility, men fucking men, bodies meeting animals, men fucking dogs, gods and mythic creatures, desire spilling out into folklore and fantasy, characters freed from the limits of our world. I adore this exhibition—it is powerfully beautiful and obscenely horny.
The works’ scale makes the act of looking feel private (and Sadao himself drew them in private, which might explain in part why they were so small and easy to hide by nature) but they now occupy an unusually public, porous space. Custom Lane is a hub of people drinking coffee, meeting, working, passing through, any of whom might wander almost accidentally into Hasegawa's universe of sex and gods and animals and unrestrained queer desire. Hasegawa kept this part of himself from those closest to him while making images in which desire is anything but hidden: sex, animals, humongous dicks, fantasies unconstrained by the ordinary. Then, in 1999, after two twenty-minute conversations, he entrusted the work to someone else (!) Perhaps that was another way of choosing how he wanted to be seen—not necessarily then, not by everyone, but eventually.
Now, in Leith, the private fantasy has become a public encounter. We peer at these small works to see a part of him that during his lifetime remained deliberately out of view.
Over at the City Art Centre, Sandra George's extraordinary photographic archive produces another kind of intimacy. Start from the Level brings together photographs taken across more than two decades, many being shown publicly for the first time.
George was born in Nottingham, raised between Jamaica and the UK, and eventually made Edinburgh home, where photography existed alongside her life as a community organiser and advocate. Her images move between the everyday and the political: families, children, streets, protest, motherhood, swimming pools, bars, pool halls, friendship, communities living alongside one another. There is an extraordinary openness to George's photographs: people let her come in close and the images are not extracted from these places so much as made from within relationships with them. Her archive is now held by Craigmillar Now, in the community she spent so much of her life documenting.
I am thinking about how intimacy leaves things behind.
Standing in front of one photograph of children playing in their underwear, I suddenly remembered being a child in a school gym, exercising in only my pants. It wasn't a particularly significant memory until that moment, one of those small humiliations or peculiarities of childhood that had apparently been sitting somewhere inside me waiting to be retrieved, and I found myself imagining a photograph of that small, earlier version of my body surviving somewhere: catalogued, digitised, displayed on a gallery wall. Strangers leaning towards it. What would I want them to see?
Maybe this question feels particularly present to me because my relationship to my own body, and who has experienced that body, has changed. There are versions of myself I once allowed the world to see that I would choose to present differently now, versions that aren't false exactly, but aren't quite me anymore either. The image in an archive remains still while the person it belongs to keeps moving. Whilst Craigmillar Now's work to reconnect George's photographs with the people and communities they depict makes that distance between image and person feel especially alive, I cannot shake the idea that an image might preserve a fraction of a second perfectly, but it cannot preserve the person; we grow older, our bodies (and our relationships with them) change. The language we have for ourselves changes too. Something we once wanted seen might become something we hold closer. Something once hidden might become the part of ourselves we most want to show. Perhaps an archive, if it is going to care for living people rather than simply preserve their images, has to be capable of changing too. And yet George's photographs also remind me why we keep things in the first place. Her camera moved between motherhood and political action, between the intimate lives of women and the activist movements taking place around her, without necessarily treating these as separate worlds. Her own life—as a mother, a Black woman, a community worker and activist—sits alongside the lives she documented. There is something powerful in that accumulation: not simply evidence that these people were here, but that they organised, cared, protested, raised children, made communities and lived political lives.
Sandra George, Dalgety Street – 1982. Sandra + Tyler, 1982.
Courtesy Craigmillar Now © Sandra George Estate
Courtesy Craigmillar Now © Sandra George Estate
Across the festival, art seems continually to be changing the distance between bodies, between depictions and images, between ourselves and the things we are looking at: at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Esther Castle's Abundant Parts brings this into the material of her body itself. Behind the window is an other-worldly garden, a large ceramic character surrounded by cast leaves which seem to turn towards it and away from it at once, inspecting, sheltering, celebrating, perhaps recoiling. Esther draws a connection between the non-normative body and weeds, both subjected to systems that decide what belongs, what is desirable, what should be controlled or removed, and suddenly the garden becomes another place in which a person has to negotiate the terms on which it is allowed to exist.
There is something about the use of clay here too, the physical labour of making with it: pressing, pulling, smoothing, building, the material answering back to the hands working it. Clay holds touch. Earth is handled into something bodily and imperfect and abundant, a person made from earth surrounded by unruly plant life, and then placed behind glass where the rest of us gather outside and look in. Again, I find myself thinking about presentation and about the strange vulnerability of putting an object into the world and having no control over whether what looks back responds with celebration, curiosity, discomfort or disgust. But gradually the scale of all this looking I’ve been reflecting on, begins to change.
Esther Castle, Abundant Parts, 2026, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. Photo: Alexander Appleby. Image courtesy Esther Castle & Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop.
On Calton Hill, Emii Alrai's Guardian sits above Edinburgh: animal, vessel, ribcage, ruin, monument. Something simultaneously ancient and newly arrived. It seems excavated and futuristic at once — we can't quite tell whether we have unearthed it or it has landed here.
It is difficult to imagine a better place for something so temporally confused. Calton Hill is a landscape crowded with Edinburgh's attempts to understand and mythologise itself through monuments, including the unfinished National Monument, that great neoclassical promise abandoned halfway through and nicknamed Edinburgh's Disgrace, a title I occasionally like to claim for myself. Guardian enters into that mythology while refusing to behave like a monument. It is fractured and bodily, part creature and part container, its huge bowl-like form held by an exposed metal structure, and Edinburgh has already begun to make its own additions: dicks scratched into the scaffolding by visitors, another kind of ancient symbolism, another contemporary ritual of leaving evidence that says, pretty crudely, my dick was here.
Guardian arrived on the hill as Edinburgh was preparing to look upwards, and the photographs from the solar eclipse show people gathered beneath it, many with their faces turned towards the sky. From a distance they look almost devotional, as though Guardian has summoned them there. They have gathered for the sun and moon, rather than the sculpture, but the accidental choreography is difficult to resist: crowds around a strange new monument, collectively looking beyond it. It feels particularly at home here because Calton Hill has always been preoccupied with looking beyond itself. The City Observatory connects this small Edinburgh hill to the enormousness of astronomical measurement; nearby, the time ball once gave ships in the Firth of Forth a visual signal by which to set their chronometers, to set out on their journeys of colonial violence. Street, sea, horizon, time, stars, horror, all threaded together from one small piece of land.
From beside Guardian, looking north towards Leith, another set of strange structures punctures the horizon: enormous yellow pieces of infrastructure destined to support offshore wind turbines in the North Sea. Someone I was with described them as obstructing the view.
I find them exhilarating: What, after all, counts as the view?
Emii Alrai and Guardian. Photo: Neil Hanna
Edinburgh is particularly good at constructing versions of itself to be looked at: skyline, ruin, monument, castle, column, unfinished Parthenon. There is an idea of the city that we have collectively decided constitutes the beautiful view and anything new risks becoming an intrusion upon it, but standing beside Guardian the distinction between monument and obstruction starts to collapse. The metal structure supporting Emii's strange mythological object was fabricated by the same people involved in producing those structures destined for the North Sea. The thing we have climbed the hill to look at and the thing supposedly spoiling what we came here to see emerge from the same material world.
I like the yellow structures precisely because they interrupt things, they insist that the horizon is not an image we have inherited but a place where something is still happening.
And perhaps Guardian does something similar. Its title suggests protection but it isn't immediately clear what is being guarded, or from whom, or for how long. The city? The hill? The sea beneath it? A mythology? A future? Emii speaks to its imagery as a boat, and how the image of boats is one held with a heavy heart in the climate of abject racism which is unfolding all around us. From this particular point in Edinburgh, where people once looked towards a falling ball to understand the time and towards the stars to try to understand their place in the universe, guardianship starts to feel like another attempt to locate ourselves: where are we, in relation to everything around us?
Nearby at Collective Gallery, Katie Paterson takes the scale outwards again, to ecology, geology and deep time, while simultaneously making it tiny.
A friend visiting Edinburgh a few days earlier described Collective to me as a “doll's house”, and I couldn't shake the imagery it created. Inside the Dome are Katie's nearly two hundred tiny amulets, recreations of talismanic objects from across cultures and millennia, but remade using matter taken from places that are themselves precarious: rock newly exposed by retreating glaciers, coral from the Great Barrier Reef, stones from islands facing rising seas. Materials carrying evidence of enormous planetary changes reduced into things so small they might disappear inside a closed fist.
They look almost like toys, things to pick up, turn over, keep in a pocket. A talisman handed to you by a friend before a long journey. Objects made, across human history, because sometimes we have needed to believe that something small enough to hold might protect us from things impossibly larger than ourselves. What does it mean to extract them from their ancestral homes? Or does the act of replication negate this— - a similar question is a central caveat in Emii’s practice. Guardian is made in the image of Sumerian divine beings—the Lamassu—one of which is held in The British Museum.
I desperately want to touch them. To take a small token away from that doll’s house and slide it into my friend’s hand.
Afterlife, Katie Paterson, 2026, created in collaboration with architects Zeller & Moye, at Collective Gallery, Edinburgh. Photo: © Eoin Carey.
Also at Collective, Richard Maguire's There is no beginning, as there is no end returns to archival imagery through colonialism, race and homoeroticism; speaking about the work, Richard described his figures as holding a dual reference to “an end time and ecstatic time.” That lingered within me as I wrote this. People disappear; communities are displaced; environments are destroyed; bodies die, and simultaneously people fuck, dance, flirt, play, make photographs, make sculptures, make ridiculous beautiful things, fall in love and insist on being seen.
And perhaps this is where the two kinds of intimacy I have been trying to understand begin to meet: there is the intimacy between people; sex, friendship, bodies, photographs, play, community, being looked at, being known, being held, and there is another intimacy, human to earth, human to mythology, human to deep time, human to moon and stars. At first these seem like opposite scales. But perhaps one sits inside the other?
Maybe an archive is one way of saying: keep this. And perhaps Guardian introduces a slightly different thread: care for this. Keeping and caring aren't always the same thing.
You can possess an image without caring for the person inside it. You can preserve an object while destroying the landscape it came from. You can build a monument to a history while choosing not to look at the history happening around it. Maybe intimacy isn't simply about closeness; maybe it is about the responsibility that closeness requires, what we owe to the things and people who allow us near. For a festival full of archives, bodies and objects concerned with what survives us, the eclipse felt like an absurdly appropriate beginning: Edinburgh looking upwards together, briefly reminded that all our attempts to understand ourselves take place inside systems infinitely larger and older than us, and still, faced with all that enormousness, we keep making things.
A photograph.
A drawing.
An amulet.
An archive.
Something that fits into another person's hand.
Something that says: I was here. Please, look.
Something that says: I was here. Please, look.
Thanks to Edinburgh Art Festival for supporting Rosie and PAM to attend the EAF Press Day.