Creative Collaborations
I love to work with others. Do get in touch if you have any creative projects, workshops or other ideas you’d like to work with me on.
Here are some of my current partnerships….
Emily and Katie have been teaching together for many years, developing a creative partnership that brings energy and insight to their courses. Their teaching is shaped by conversation, shared demonstrations and lively exchanges about the process of drawing and painting. The result is an atmosphere that is both supportive and invigorating — encouraging you to experiment, take risks and discover new possibilities in your work.
Together, Emily and Katie create a learning environment that is calm, practical and full of curiosity. With more than fifty years of combined painting experience, both artists are sensitive to responding to individual students and generous in sharing their knowledge. Exercises and demonstrations are carefully structured into manageable steps that build confidence whilst opening up new ways of working.
Whether working in the landscape, the garden, the studio or online, Emily and Katie’s collaborative teaching brings together two perspectives, two voices and a shared commitment to helping artists develop their own unique responses to their experience of being in a place.
“Katie and I have been delivering courses together for years. We continue to spark off one another, bringing both playfulness and a wealth of knowledge that comes with time. We trust the creative process and are more daring with how far we push our work. We love sharing the idea of Serious Play with our students as it has become something that shapes not only our paintings and drawings, but is an integral part of who we are and our everyday lives.”
~ Emily
"Each time I teach with Emily brings new insights and new ways of seeing. Over the years we’ve learned to slow down, observe more closely and trust the process. We try to strip things back to what is essential — to simply be present, notice things with a clarity and awareness, and respond from the heart - and we encourage our students to do the same."
— Katie Sollohub
Marina’s approach to drawing is very close to mine, which is why we want to work together. While she comes from a dance and performance background, and I am from a visual art drawing background, we both approach drawing in the same way - as a sensory, physical, tactile and emotional experience - which can be further explored through movement, meditation, and the gestural mark.
Marina leads from her own Somatic Art Practice® - “an embodied art-making practice that explores the relationship between the psychophysical experience of corporeal structures & artistic gesture.” I too focus very much on the body and the senses as a vital part of the drawing process, using meditation as the starting point, to come into presence. Drawing from full awareness, whether from inside the body or from what is in the space around us.
Together our teachings, mirror and weave, offering similar approaches with our own personal differences of touch, of voice, of everyday life and creative life experiences. Together we aim to bring you a drawing workshop that offers an inspirational and meaningful way to engage with the body, art and creativity.
Marina and I first met in Brighton in 2000s, when she was finishing her degree at Brighton Uni and I was at the beginning of my teaching pathway. We both used to life model, and I worked with Marina as my model for some of my early life drawing classes. It helps when you have an understanding of life modelling, so the teaching comes from an embodied experience - and right from the start it felt like a collaboration, so Marina and I would work together in the classes.
We have been friends and colleagues ever since, with our paths crossing here and there, in art studios as well as on our travels. Marina now spending time between Barcelona and Greece, which makes it a good opportunity for us to catch up when we can, in some beautiful locations. We have run a couple of in person Somatic Drawing workshops here in the UK as well as our new programme of online workshops Movement Marks and Meditation. Our plan is now to spend more time workmen together in person, developing ideas for retreats, workshops and courses, both in person and online.
We are also pursuing ideas to collaborate creatively in our own practices, following up the opportunity to do a residency together in 2027, a week in Greece, to see what will emerge when we set aside this time and really tune into the creative force in each other, and in the space around us. Watch our conversation and demo with Marina on Movement, Marks and Meditation
Katrina is a poet, a performer, a celebrant, a swimmer, and a dear friend. She hosts a monthly open mic music and poetry night on a houseboat in Shoreham by Sea where we both meet. She is the queen of improvisation, making up a collective poem from the words offered by the participants each week - writing this on the spot, and performing it at the end of the night. This is a real gift, and magical to watch.
I have worked with Katrina in the creative teaching space, drawing from this same creative, improvisational way of thinking, and her expressive bodied way of working with words, which inspires others around her to draw, or write, with a kind of infectious energy and enthusiasm. One such collaboration was called Poetry and Pose, inviting participants to connect words to the body, to movement, and to drawing.
Together, we are planning to run some poetry and improvisational workshops, developing the relationship with image and word. As yet we do not have any dates, but if you sign up for my or Katrina’s newsletter, or follow us on social media, you will hear it from us first. Watch this space.
Katrina and I met on the beach, in our all year round 8am sea swimming group, affectionately called the Waterbabies. Whilst embers of the group come and go, I knew I had met a true long lasting friend in Katrina. She is an inspiration, a kind and thoughtful being, and has an energy that warms the heart. We meet up regularly, not just to swim - but also to write together, or simply to sit on the beach and share the magic of the moment.
I have uploaded a beautiful video of Katrina reading a poem she wrote about the process of drawing and painting, as she observed the artists in the studio Painting the Moving Figure
Vajradashini was recommended me as a Buddhist teacher who would probably appeal to me, as she grounds her teachings in everyday life, in the same way I like to root my own teaching in the stuff we find around us, the ordinary things, the humble still life. I loved her online course using the Japanese concept of WabiSabi to introduce buddhist concepts of emptiness, imperfection - I could immediately see how this crossed over into the way I use drawing to explore the form and space.
After this first meeting online, we continued to meet up weekly in a co-workign space Vajradashini hosted, and which I found invaluable. A generous sharing space where all participants brought suggestions and questions about how to run a business with “buddies” principles. We all learnt a lot, from each other, and about each other.
We have remained friends ever since and are just beginning to bring our shared curiosity and ways of seeing the world together into these pop up workshops. In fact we have only met in person for one week, at an in person retreat in Rivendell, that Vajradashini teaches every year - testimony to the power of the internet is the fact that we really felt we already knew each other. We just had to poke each other a few times to check we were real!
Our first collaboration, Creative Reflections on Love, was a retreat-style day weaving together dharma teachings, meditation, movement, mark-making, poems, and drawing exercises around the theme of love. No Buddhist background or art experience was needed — just a willingness to explore.
Our second, Ways of Seeing, brought art and dharma into direct conversation — not art illustrating Buddhism, or Buddhism explaining art, but the two genuinely informing each other. Across the day we moved between drawing, writing, simple photography, meditation, and reflection, with a long spacious break in the middle for participants to wander and try exercises in their own environment.
Vajradashni lives in Sweden and Red Ladder Studio is her retreat centre there. From May to September 2026, she’s opening it up for small retreats. Check her work here.