Skin Hunger documents the artist’s experience with professional cuddlers, known as Professional Touch Practitioners. A new form of labor for the 21st century, these cuddlers are paid an hourly fee to caress others, which is distinct from massage therapies. There are strict boundaries around consent that are negotiated before any interaction, as witnessed in Diamond’s Wheel of Consentembroidery. The life-scaled wallpaper is documentation from a cuddle session, accompanied by videos of the artists from sessions with four different cuddlers, which are shown on monitors.

Diamond’s Skin Hunger photographs are intimate and touching as they oscillate between seductive and empathetic: legs intertwine like those of lovers; one woman’s head rests on another’s chest; a caring person wraps their arm around the artist’s midriff as they lie spooning. Like much of her work, from the Reborn Doll series to Constructed Families, Diamond becomes part of the subculture that she explores. Here she engaged with the cuddlers and gained an authentic understanding of the need for this practice. The resulting project is emblematic of our increasingly distanced world since the coronavirus. Combined with an increased reliance on digital platforms, humans around the world are suffering a crisis of loneliness and isolation.

Skin Hunger is an extension of Diamond’s ongoing interest in the human desire for intimacy, both real and imagined, organic and synthetic. Much of her work explores and documents the dance between what is authentic, and what is projected or constructed. Through collaborations with strangers, mimes, professional actors, and untrained outsider artists, she uses recognizable photographic language to make objects, construct events, and forge artificial histories and relationships for the camera, exploring the inherent fictions and complex perspectives of photography, and the conflation between the documentary and constructed tableaux genres.