Meet Artist Scott Temple

I follow light through the mountains, fields, blackwater creeks, wetlands, and coastal edges of North Carolina, waiting to see what the living world might reveal.

I have spent much of my life wandering around looking for something I cannot always name.

Sometimes I carry a camera.

The wandering began in the mountains of North Carolina, where a trail disappearing around a bend could make the world feel larger than whatever I thought I knew about it. Years later, I found that same feeling in the coastal plain: blackwater creeks, open fields, dunes, cypress trees, marsh grass, birds moving through weather, and clouds gathering over water.

The mountains taught me to climb toward what I could not see. Eastern North Carolina taught me to stand still long enough for something to arrive.

While studying at Appalachian State University, I lived for a time in a teepee at Turtle Island Preserve with Eustace Conway, digging trails, splitting rails, moving stone, and learning through the body how closely wind, water, wood, weather, soil, and human hands belong to one another.

Later, I earned an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Writing and photography still grow from the same impulse for me: to linger long enough for the familiar world to loosen its name.

I am less interested in photographing scenery than in moments of encounter: a bird crossing the sky, cotton holding the last light, marsh grass bending under wind, a tree leaning into a path, water changing beneath weather.

These are not, for me, pictures of a world outside us. They are traces of relationship.

I hope the photographs offer more than a view of the landscape. I hope they carry some of its weather, stillness, movement, and wild attention into the rooms where they live.

Sometimes, standing very still, I have the feeling I am not the only one doing the looking.