Last year I travelled up to the far north of Scotland with my family. My partner surfs and charts were looking good so we headed on a spontaneous road trip with our kids. Some other surfers we know joined us so there was a little gang of us trailing the Highland roads looking for the illusive waves.
This photo of rain on a car window was taken as I stood chatting to a surfer in the freezing Scottish wind last year. He was getting ready to head down to the shore, as my kids played in the mud by the car. Just to set the scene, there was a little frenzy of surfers arriving, getting ready and scurrying down to the shore with their boards. As I chatted to this long boarder about Scottish surf culture, I noticed rain drops on the window of his old Peugeot car and looked a little closer.
Something about capturing the simplicity of a fleeting moment, is powerful to me. I could have chosen plenty of other images to be included in the Lincoln pop up show- stunning scenery, rugged Highland beaches. But this image captures the quiet sense of awe I felt in that unceremonious moment. In a tiny car park in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes it’s the unlikeliest, smallest things that make me feel awe. Like rain drops on a window that capture my attention more than roaring waves or huge mountains.
Peering through raindrops on glass with all this flurry of activity around me..I remember thinking how serene and still it was inside that empty car. Like a small church parked there, on the Lord’s Day. But this church was abandoned- the congregation had gone surfing. I thought about how mundane, small or unsuspecting place can be a churches too.Reverence doesn’t need a grand entrance.
It was a Sunday. In this kind of a remote Highland place, that’s a big deal. I couldn’t help notice how incongruous this little circus of activity was in a conservative landscape like this. Having lived in Sutherland as a kid I was very familiar with the cold judgement of folk that didn’t follow the strict rules of the Free Church and their observance of the Sabbath.
So there was a lot to reflect on in this one little moment..Scottish surf culture and a church of sorts- an unlikely pairing in the Highland outback but hanging nonetheless on either side of this pane of Peugeot window glass.
On the beach the houses dotted around seemed to glare in our direction when the sun caught their bare windows. Beside us a large sign warned camper vans weren’t permitted. On closer inspection, it had been covered in surf stickers left by previous wave seekers. Gales and salty air had tried to remove them but like defiant limpets on rocks they just clung harder.
Unceremoniously one of our group had hung his wetsuit on the sign as he got ready in his camper, parked right next to it and paying no heed to the rules. I had just got my camera out to take a photo of what I thought was quite an amusing scene- this officious sign, decorated with stickers and now a wetsuit. It loomed in front of what was one of the most beautiful landscapes I’d ever seen. A huge expanse of golden light on a river..sand merging into sky and sea. The surfer looked at me quizzically and whipped away his wetsuit before I could take the picture. He muttered something like ‘Are you getting some good pictures there?’ Obviously very confused about my subject matter.
The remote Scottish beach that was the basis of the Rain Piece encaustic work and later a series of drawings.
(Update: Feb 2026)
I had originally planned to to create a cyanotype of this photo by making a digital negative using my Epson printer with tonal curve software I’d been learning. What transpired was that the printer wouldn’t print the quality of negative that I needed despite many attempts to get my computer to respond to the new software settings rather than generic ones.
This called for a drastic pivot in direction. I opened up an old Impossible Project Lab device that would print Polaroid photos from digital images it captured from my iPhone screen. It was time to get back to basics- I loaded the only Polaroid film I had available which was expired into the lab. I began positioning my iPhone above the lens of the Lab and pulled out its rudimentary shutter to expose images onto Polaroid film.
Just my hands, my intuition about exposure timing and holding the developing Polaroids against the warmth of my skin to speed up development, it really was an embodied tactile process.
From a technical exercise in tonal curves and a blinking computer monitor, I’d now moved into a process that was messy, slightly chaotic and very instinctive. T
The initial photo is taken where I’d captured surface and stillness underwent a digital to analogue transformation via the Impossible Lab, and my hands. With this phase adding extra unplanned phone notifications into the imagery, it was then soaked in water, removing the emulsion layer, holding the image. This was then dried on Japanese Hosho paper and later pressed onto the warm encaustic surface and layered with a final skin of encaustic.
On reflection, the initial rain on window photograph was fundamentally about surface as threshold. As a boundary between inside and out and a holder of rain and light. The relationship between witness capturer. These are themes my work keeps returning to.