Workshops
I lead creative workshops both for adults and children in a variety of settings, from painting and drawing classes through to exploratory workshops about making maps, telling stories and documenting embodied experience. This page shows a snapshot of some of my workshops, click on the images to read more about the individual projects.
Painting & Drawing
I teach painting and drawing courses for adult learners. Drawing inspiration from modern and contemporary abstract artists, including from my own work, students start off with observational drawing and abstracting from visual stimuli before progressively moving on towards more intuitive and expressive ways of making art. My courses focus on play, experimentation and process and are designed to help students develop their own visual language to create a body of work using a range of wet and dry media.
I currently offer online courses via York Learning, and I am available for one to one private tuition in-person or online. Please contact me for more information
Experimental mapping
My experimental mapping workshops focus on mapping as a creative process rather than a means to produce an end result. During workshops we explore sound and drawing as tools to explore the place we are in and to tell stories about places we remember and imagine. For instance we draw maps of journeys that we make with our mind’s eye, and we explore the possibilities of mark-making in response to the feeling of touch or the interpretation of textural qualities in environmental sounds.
These workshops are based on the principle that drawing is a physical act that we do with our bodies, and is therefore well situated to explore the relationships between the materiality of spaces and the physicality of being a body somewhere.
We might then use those drawings as blueprints for creative detours in order to get lost in familiar places. By drawing and exploring together with others, we may discover things about the place we are in, about ourselves and about each other.
Health Mapping workshop at Science Gallery. Kings College London (2024)
Tuning in to sonic environments, and interpreting the textural qualities of sound through mark-making, and considering how those sounds make you feel.
“Sensing Spaces” Online workshop at FEELed lab, University of British Columbia Okanagan (2024)
Embodied maps of felt experiences. Students created visual responses to their embodied encounters of environmental conditions.
Work by Isabel Porter and Khezie Gibbons
“Unmapping” workshop at Kosaten, Tokyo (2019)
Drawing maps of remembered places through touch onto someones hand, whilst they draw what they feel. Then using those drawings as maps to guide an exploratory detour.
Mapping the Medina
Artist Residency at Twiza, Tunis (2014)
A collaborative mapping activity involving drawing personal maps and using them to de-navigate the historic medina of Tunis, whilst making drawings of discoveries and encounters along the way.
The drawings were made on tissue paper and then collaged into a large scale collage map for a public exhibiton.
Collage
A collage workshop exploring ideas around palimpsests, memories and mapping. This workshop involved minds eye drawings, with eyes closed, as a starting point to visualise details and impressions of a local journey, and then working with some amazing old maps of the various Richmonds around the world, and some lush art magazines, to map and reimagine our experiences and memories of the neighbourhood.
Palimpsest Projects event programme curated by Gina DeGagna (Richmond Library, London, 2025)
Site specific
Combining elements from the workshops listed above including drawing, writing, sound recording, video making, collage and using pre-existing maps, participants document personally significant details of places to create maps of lived experience. For instance they might draw maps of an everyday journey whilst visualising certain details, or they might think of anecdotes, memories or associations connected to a place.
For example, I led workshops to inform the design guides for a construction project (Royal Docks, London 2020), which involved walk-and-draw sessions in the area to map what it felt like to be there, and to suggest areas for future improvement. I have worked with groups of young people in coastal towns around the UK to discover their experiences of growing up by the sea (Growing up in Coastal Towns, UCL 2024). I worked with children to create a local neighbourhood map of their favourite spots (Het Buurtatelier, 2016). And I worked on a project which focused on drawing maps of places and personal objects as a way to tell stories of displacement (Ruptured Atlas, 2024).
Walk and Draw workshop
Drawing sounds and sights in the area, drawing what stands out, followed by a collage making session (see the background image to this section)
West-Silvertown Foundation (2020)
Photo: Tian-Khee Siong
Growing up in Coastal Towns
University College London (2024)
Dit is mijn buurt
Het Buurtatelier, Amsterdam (2016)
Young Citizens Atlas Workshop
Sensory experience mapping with primary school pupils.
Star Lane Primary School/ Livingmaps Network/ Rosetta Arts/ Purple Stars/ Rix Centre (2023)
Ruptured Atlas (2024)
Drawings, collages and maps made by participants in the project.
Examples here include memories of Maisaa’s high school, Omeed’s street in 2024 compared with the aftermath of ISIS atrocities in Ba’ashiqa in 2014, and Saada’s drawing of light switches in her new home comparing how they differ from the exposed wiring of the lights in her previous home in the village.
