The Winter Market returns for a full weekend of festive shopping. Featuring a carefully-curated selection of stallholders across the site, this year’s market will be even bigger than the last and will showcase the best of independent makers and artisan products from Edinburgh and beyond – a perfect opportunity to find truly unique gifts locally for your family and friends.

“A smile can hide all the pain…” Jaggy Edina Productions presents a bigger, bolder production of The Rhinestone Cowboy back to Edinburgh for two dates only as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival. The Rhinestone Cowboy is a darkly humorous, raw, and emotive one-woman play written and performed by Leith-based poet Hjarta, with a diverse multimedia setting by composer and audiovisual artist Harry Bongo. Based on a true story and written by this real-life mother and son duo, this high-octane production maps a young man’s tumultuous journey from Scotland to Iceland. Pulsating sound design fused with bold visual projections provide a visceral backdrop to a blistering trip from one emotional landscape to another. Written as a tribute to Dan The Man, the work celebrates his kaleidoscopic life - whose humour, charm and resilience masked internal demons. Written as a tribute to Dan The Man, ‘Rhinestone’ celebrates his kaleidoscopic life - whose humour, charm and resilience masked internal demons.

Forming Space is a major new exhibition presenting work by the artists and makers of Garvald Edinburgh. Working across contemporary craft and visual art, they explore the theme of the vessel through the act of making, revealing the relationship between form, the space within and the layered meanings a vessel can hold. The exhibition places the act of making at its centre. Through shaping and transforming materials in their own way, artists investigate the vessel as both a physical object and a conceptual one. The work explores vessels as functional objects that carry not only physical contents, but also meaning and personal significance. Making these forms becomes a way of thinking, expressing and communicating. Forming Space features work by learning-disabled and autistic artists and makers working across a range of material disciplines and includes ceramics, textiles, printmaking, glass, jewellery, woodwork, and origami-based sculpture. Together, the varied responses reveal the richness of contemporary craft and visual art produced within Garvald Edinburgh’s studios, where supported making spaces foster distinctive creative voices. About Garvald Edinburgh Garvald Edinburgh supports adults with learning disabilities and autistic adults through a model of creative workshops and studios. Across its visual arts and craft studios, makers are supported to develop individual creative practices within a collaborative environment that values skill, experimentation and artistic expression.

What happens at the edge of things? This exhibition is preoccupied with life-forms of the precipice – grief, separation, cries and silence, destruction, death and birth – and its inhabitants: ghosts, prophets and crises. At the heart of the exhibition is a series of fine art photographs by Franco-Iranian photographer XEDER, created in collaboration with artist Alex Rigg. The images include collaborations with Dana Simm, Topaz Pauls and Suzi Cunningham. Bringing together photography, performance, spoken word and critical discussion, Dîdâr creates a space where images become starting points for other forms of encounter, interpretation and experience. The exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of live events, including performances from Oceanallover and Helmut Lemke, life drawing and spoken-word interventions that emerge from and respond to the photographs. A facilitated critical reflection, hosted by writer, critic and podcaster Bram Gieben, will bring together guest critics, artists and audiences to explore the ideas and questions raised by the work.

Elizabeth Ogilvie is an environmental artist working with a fusion of art/science, producing poetic experiential installations using water and video as her main media and research focus. Robert Page is an artist-filmmaker whose work blurs the boundaries between documentary filmmaking and fine art, often exploring human activity, both positive and negative, in and on the environment. At a fundamental level, marine life helps determine the very nature of our planet, with every second breath we take generated by the ocean. Kelp forests, seagrass meadows and saltmarshes, amongst other ocean environments – our so-called blue carbon habitats – represent significant opportunities to offer a nature-based solutions to mitigate and adapt to climate change, whilst providing invaluable havens for marine life. CONVERSATION WITH OUR OCEAN, a visceral meditation on such ecosystems recorded in Atlantic and north-sea waters, celebrates some of our greatest weapons to combat the climate crisis by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and proposes the vision of a dynamic collaboration for us all with the ocean – our revered partner. Working between creative documentary and the imaginary, the artists create films and immersive installations that explore deep time and invisible systems. In the cavernous interior of the Dissection Room at Summerhall inspired by the work of world leading marine scientists and colleagues, Ogilvie & Page will transform the space with an ambitious immersive installation, comprising semi-abstract video projections, digital prints and text works.

Scotland has the highest rate of drug related death in Europe. One of the highest known rates in the world. In communities across the country, families, loved ones, friends, act as support for people with lived experience of substance dependency. A new intimate tabletop performance, from award-winning theatre company Tortoise in a Nutshell, Concerned Others presents the stories of critically underheard voices, accounts that paint us as a nation struggling to recognise a deadly culture of shame, ignorance and misunderstanding surrounding substance dependence and drug-related death. Intricate miniature worlds unfold in front of the audience’s eyes, creating detailed, confronting microcosms of contemporary Scotland, placed halfway between dream and cold reality.

The Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival presents an exhibition of work by five artists commissioned to create new work in response to its 20th year theme, Reflections. Working across textiles, mixed- media collage, painting, photography and sculpture, Kelly Zou, Mairi Timoney, Nat Ophelia Walpole, Steven Jones and Jasmine Esme reflect on how identity, motherhood, bullying and trauma have shaped their mental health.

David Peacock began painting large canvases in acrylic in the 1990s in the NHS Art Therapy unit when he lived in Gogarburn Hospital. His style was mainly horizontal stripes in colour until he became a student at Leith School of Art from 2016 – 2025. He began to diversify both in style and materials in response to more formal art teaching with experienced tutors. He also thrived being part of a group with other artists. He had enormous discipline in his work, never missing classes and working from start to finish with serious application. He lived 17 happy and creative years as a member of the supportive L’Arche community in Leith until his death. He regularly took part in many of the art activities. He was a non-verbal autistic man with learning disabilities. He never spoke and communicated non-verbally, including though his art. In this memorial exhibition of David’s work, see over 40 of his many paintings in a celebration of his art. There is also a video box with film and stills showing his life as a painter. His work is in private collections in the UK, NHS and L’Arche locations. His first publicly exhibited work was at the Talbot Rice Gallery in 1996. He has exhibited in numerous joint exhibitions since then and had 3 solo exhibitions, including this memorial exhibition ‘Colour in Silence’.

An evening of poetry, prose and photography inspired by Dîdâr: I am the feather and the bird is the precipice. Writers, poets and members of the public were invited to respond to the exhibition’s photographs and its themes of encounter, identity, memory, distance, belonging and connection. Their words will come together in a new publication accompanying the exhibition and, for one evening, will be brought to life through live readings. Hear the voices of the contributors as their poetry and prose enter into dialogue with the photographs and offer different perspectives, interpretations and emotional responses to the work.

Glasgow-based multi- instrumentalist and singer/songwriter Jo Mango will debut songs from an exciting new EP, commissioned for the 2026 Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival and inspired by Nabokov’s imagery. The SMHAF-commissioned songs, showcased tonight, will explore how past trauma impedes on our image of the future, the past and our current selves. Jo is one of six SMHAF commissioned artists this year and this special live show will coincide with an exhibition of SMHAF artist commissions at Summerhall, called Reflect, Reclaim, Reimagine.

Winner of the Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe, Beth Wants the D is a candid and very funny autobiographical comedy about living with bipolar disorder, written and performed by Beth May. The show is returning to Scotland as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival’s Summerhall programme. This performance will be followed by a Q&A with the creative team. Written and performed by Beth May in collaboration with Riley Rose Critchlow (Director), Mahayla Laurence (Stage Manager), Olivia Cade (Associate Producer) and Alison Zatta (Producer).

Milly Sweeney and Briony Martha are two of Scotland’s most exciting young theatre-makers. As part of SMHAF’s programme for young people, we present an exclusive double bill of Briony’s 2026 Edinburgh Fringe show Parasocial Activity – which won a Fringe First and was shortlisted for the Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award – and Almond, a solo performance by Milly Sweeney (who was also shortlisted for this year’s Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award) that is currently touring schools with Catherine Wheels theatre company. Both shows powerfully address the dangers of growing up in a society that is constantly online, from unhealthy relationships with AI chatbots to discussion groups that celebrate eating disorders. Following the performances, Milly and Briony will answer questions from the audience.

A facilitated critical reflection, hosted by writer, critic and podcaster Bram Gieben, will bring together guest critics, artists and audiences to explore the ideas and questions raised by Dîdâr: I am the feather and the bird is the precipice. Rather than offering a formal panel discussion or a single interpretation of the exhibition, the evening will create space for an open and curious conversation around the work. What do we see in these images? How do photography, memory, identity and lived experience shape the way we look? What happens when we encounter work from a perspective or culture different from our own? Bram will facilitate the discussion, inviting contributions from the artists, guest critics and the audience. Join us for an evening of looking, listening and thinking together about the questions Dîdâr asks of us.

Come and see the 14th Out of Sight Out of Mind, a one-of-a-kind exhibition presenting hundreds of artworks made by people with experience of mental health issues. This year’s exhibition is focused in one gallery and will extend its reach with a day of events, an afternoon tea, and the release of hundreds more artworks. All organised by and for people with experience of mental health issues. The exhibition presents a wide variety of themes and topics. Please be aware that some may be affecting, thought provoking, adult, everyday and/or awesome.