a truth

Ok – I’ll admit it; this whole piece – prose, pamphlet, stitching, the people we meet – is a work of fiction.

I took a prompt from an open call and, from that, extended the Alwin universe from the broader Templars research project.

Creator’s notes

The open call caught my attention for two reasons: it was an unusual framing — queer lives and nature aren’t often linked directly — and the curator was someone I knew. It felt like the right moment to take what I’d been building in the Alwin universe and apply it somewhere new.

The creative logic followed quickly from a single constraint. A thirteenth-century priest at a Templar preceptory wouldn’t publicly record what he witnessed — queer or otherwise. The only way such a record survives is if it was written and hidden. The only vessel for that hiding is a document that already existed — a preceptory record, a liturgical volume — with the pages concealed inside it.

From there each decision followed the one before. The person who finds it has to be someone who recognises what they’re looking at — a Victorian antiquarian book repairer with eyes for the same sex. The person who then does something with it — privately, carefully — has to be someone with both the knowledge and the motive. And the handstitched artwork that eventually holds the pamphlet has to be made by hands with a reason to revere it. The world wasn’t awash with queer written creativity. For a young Yorkshire lad in 1926, this might have been the only gay-coded literature he owned.

By the time I made the sleeve I had the whole backstory. I even had a photographic reconstruction of what he looked like. So I could imagine I was recreating him — sat backstage killing time while the man he served was on stage performing.

I’m predominantly a textile artist, but the medium here wasn’t purely instinct — it followed the logic too. He wasn’t rich. An old handkerchief, his stitching skills, a phrase that mattered to him. That’s how you keep something when you can’t speak it aloud.

The three voices — the frater, Vane, Tyke — each needed to feel like their own world. The prose had to feel like medieval writing rendered by a Victorian, with Vane’s notes carrying a particular put-upon pomposity. Tyke needed something closer to what would become Polari a few years later — a Yorkshire lad overlaid with theatrical affect, the dialect surfacing at moments of real feeling.

What I didn’t want to do was imagine what any of them thought. I used the practicalities of each period — how they would have lived, what pressures they were under, what workarounds their world required — and let the situations speak. The most charged moment in the whole piece is also the most restrained: two priests, a wall painting, a hand settled briefly on a shoulder. Nothing unduly untoward. But in that context, with those men, it was obvious this was more than fraternal closeness.

I suspect for those without experience of a queer life this might take some imagination. I also suspect many who have lived one will recognise the challenges, the compromises, and the workarounds immediately. That recognition across eight hundred years is what the piece is for.

Historic perspective

The preceptory at Neusum is real. The Knights Templar ran a working sheep farm on what is now Skelton Country Park – just a few miles from Leeds, from the early twelfth century until the Order’s suppression in 1307. The 1307 charges brought against the Order by the French crown included sodomy — charges historians largely regard as politically motivated and extracted under torture, but charges that nonetheless point to something real: all-male communities, living under religious discipline, for years at a time.

The Uranian private-print network is real. Small-run, unnamed, scholarly or pastoral framing used deliberately as cover — this was how queer literature circulated in late Victorian England. Vane’s pamphlet sits squarely in that tradition.

Where we’ve taken licence: the specific incidents in the fragments are imagined, not recovered. The power dynamics, the working conditions, the material culture — tools, animals, buildings, food — are as accurate as the research allows. The emotional lives are extrapolated from those conditions, not documented. The priest, Vane, and Tyke are invented whole.

The working principle throughout: what the record cannot tell us, the most likely human truth supplies.

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