Fine Art Photography School of Fine Art
Jock Thomson
Jock Thomson (b. 1996) is a photographer and artist based in Glasgow. In his images, the body is fragmented and acted upon in unexpected ways, offering a glimpse into a world where the element of surprise is paramount to the experience of sensual pleasure. Off the course of the dominant sexual script, Thomson’s photographs pervert the body as we encounter it in the normative day-to-day. Taking inspiration from fashion, fetish and fine art photography alike, Thomson seeks to break down the separation between these disciplines, as he does that of queerness and kink from public life. This is part of a larger attempt to collapse boundaries between what is and isn’t considered ‘legitimate’. The aesthetic attention given to the saturated snapshots into fetishistic life shows queerness not as a seedy underbelly of ‘straight’ life, but as a community that is deeply and rigorously attached to aesthetic thrill, one where sex is brought out of the prosaic and treated as art.
Pleasure Principle
In Pleasure Principle, Jock Thomson expands his ongoing interrogation of the queer body, desire, and the aesthetics of transgression. Through a tactile fusion of photography, print, and sculpture, the exhibition offers a vivid and visceral encounter with the body- not only as image but as material, site, and provocation.
Central to the exhibition are Thomson’s signature CMYK screenprinted photographs on latex, stretched taut over custom metal frames. These lurid, fleshly surfaces depict charged scenes of queer intimacy, their glossy, pliable materiality lending them a bodily presence. DROP- a close-up of a man spitting into another man’s eye- encapsulates the tone of the show: confrontational, absurd, and laced with humour. It’s a moment that hovers between aggression and play, revulsion and eroticism, destabilising the viewer’s expectations of intimacy and spectacle.
Elsewhere, sculptural works take on a more literal corporeality: red wax casts of fists pierce through latex membranes, framed within steel structures shaped like an anus and a vulva. Referencing Leo Bersani’s seminal essay Is the Rectum a Grave?, these works interrogate the politics of penetration, gendered anatomy, and the cultural fear of queer pleasure. They refuse the sanitised or symbolic in favour of the raw, the explicit, the unresolved.
Thomson’s practice draws equally from fashion, fetish, and fine art photography, collapsing distinctions between high and low, public and private, erotic and aesthetic. Through flash-lit snapshots and sculptural interventions, he builds a world where queerness is not marginal or metaphorical, but insistently present- sensual, excessive, and rigorously composed.
Pleasure Principle is not a manifesto, but an invitation: into a space where sex is both serious and surreal, where the body is fragmented but never passive, and where pleasure is treated not as indulgence, but as principle.
Carnal Delights
Carnal Delights is a provocative and evolving photographic series that interrogates the intersections of queerness, sexuality, kink, and liberation. Through unapologetically explicit imagery and a tongue-in-cheek sensibility, the work challenges cisheteronormative constructs of desire, inviting viewers to reconsider their own relationship to shame, pleasure, and the erotic.
Rooted in queer experience, the series celebrates sex as a site of connection, resistance, and joy. Fetish aesthetics- gloss, texture, costume, and anonymity- merge with the raw immediacy of snapshot photography to create surreal, intimate tableaux. The resulting images feel at once candid and constructed, personal and performative.
By embracing the “deviant” with wit and intention, Carnal Delights resists moral legibility, instead proposing a vision of sexuality unbound by convention- joyous, strange, and defiantly free.
