COLDWATER SESSIONS
Winter surfing in Scotland is absurd. Packing the van in the dark, shivering into a wettie still damp from sunset patrol the dusk before, and offshore winds whipping up ocean spray that blinds you on take off. It doesn’t make sense. And yet, it does.
Coldwater Sessions is a nod to surf, music, and skating, where a session is as much the process as the result. These images follow that rhythm. They’re fragments from a morning half-happened, sitting somewhere between documentary and dream. The series plays out across two sections, each anchored by one of the larger works.
First exhibited: Artisan Roast, Bruntsfield, Edinburgh, 2026.
Coldwater Sessions is a nod to surf, music, and skating, where a session is as much the process as the result. These images follow that rhythm. They’re fragments from a morning half-happened, sitting somewhere between documentary and dream.
The series plays out across two sections, each anchored by one of the larger works.
SIDE A | The Search
In Side A, The Search is a nod to the surfer’s endless quest for flow and presence, that moment when the world quiets in a dream-like way and yet everything feels sharper.
A nod to the surfer’s endless quest for flow and presence, that moment when the world quiets in a dream-like way and yet everything feels, somehow, sharper.
To drift is not the same as to be adrift. Some lives are built around fixed points. Others are built around movement: the wind changes, the tide turns, paths crisscross. The feeling that somewhere else is calling before it can be named. Possibility rather than stability.
To drift belongs to that second kind of knowing. Not restlessness, exactly, but a willingness to walk into the waves without forcing the shape of what comes next. The Search becomes less about finding one truth than about seeing and wondering.
Sifting through the noise, waiting for the wave. Not just any wave, but the wave. Sometimes finding flow means first finding stillness — and letting go.
A last look back at the waves, with lines and lines on the mind.
Three small frames from the morning that gave this series its name. Walking out of the surf, still stoked and cold but not cold enough. Talk turns from the waves just surfed to the ones still waiting.
Three small frames from the morning that gave this series its name. Walking out of the surf, still stoked and cold but not cold enough. Talk turns from the waves just surfed to the ones still waiting.
Three small frames from the morning that gave this series its name. Walking out of the surf, still stoked and cold but not cold enough. Talk turns from the waves just surfed to the ones still waiting.
SIDE B | Dark Softly
The first image, Dark Softly, holds together Side B, the wilder and stranger side where the deeps of the sea surge and yet one can’t help but feel that wry little pull to paddle back out.
Wild and strange, the deeps of the sea surging forward balanced by the pull to paddle back out for just one more wave.
Walking out with the waves behind and the sharp cold catching up. The afterglow hangs there for a moment, even as it’s already slipping into the stories we tell ourselves.
Let the noise fall away because the wave is louder. Spray roaring behind, cold water under, the mind finally out of things to say.
Recalibration takes its title from the latest album by Merlin Grey, the musician and surfer pictured here. Waves into music, music back into waves.
So much of life pulls you upward and outward: responsibilities, expectations, someone else’s needs. The self gets portioned out in small, reasonable ways until wanting something begins to feel almost inconvenient.
Into the Low seeks the opposite movement. Down below the surface noise. Low, to where your commitment is to your self and the promise to try means to go all the way.