Making Spaces 

A Community Engagement Project at West Horsley Place 2026

 Imagine a historic house full of nooks and crannies, light shining through torn curtains, worn-out carpets, and creaking floorboards, standing empty for so many years.

Now imagine this space filled with smaller spaces, a series of 3-dimensional structures, rooms within rooms, made by new visitors to this home, people who have never seen this place before. 

These makeshift structures will be lovingly made and decorated, drawn and documented, touched and inhabited by participants of the Making Spaces Project.

These temporary dwellings will bring life and people into this historic space, in a wonderful exchange of ideas, storytelling, and drawings.

Walk around, look, explore, peer in or out.

Come in, sit or lie down - connect it with your own memory and imagination.

They may be filled with sounds, spoken stories in various languages. They may be filled with drawings, or the moving image, as ideas are projected into the space and mingle with your own as you move through and around.

Imagine being part of this project, making your own space, or visiting the exhibition.

 Be inspired: listen, dream, write, draw…

How to Make Space

Step 1. Start with a simple structure, and basic materials: a stick, a packing crate, and a cardboard boxWhatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Step 2. With sticks, delineate a space on the ground 

Step 3. Add a vertical, join all these together; it’s a beginning, a framework

Step 4. Check stability, sometimes this is all it needs, and the structure is self-supporting; sometimes it needs more

Step 5. Throw a blanket over the top, make a den

Step 6. Add walls, a door, a window, if you wish

Step 7. Draw on the walls, inside and out, add colour, words, fabric, stitch, objects, details, change the lighting

Step 8. Sit in your den, write, draw, document your experience, take photographs, make a film, record your voice

Making Spaces Workshops

Some examples of recent relevant workshops around the concept of space and sensory experience include:

  • Making Room for Drawing, a 2-day workshop at Seawhite Studio, February 2023

  • Embodied Drawing and Creative Play, co-facilitated with Marina Tsartsara - Somatic Arts Practitioner, Jan 2025

  • Drawing Interiors on a Large Scale - inspired by Chichester Cathedral - May 2024

Other examples of workshops and my own art practice can be found on my website www.katiesollohub.co.uk and Instagram profile @katiesollohub

Previous Making Space Projects

A visitor lying in the Space Pod, looking in from the side, and from above 2024

I have made several 3-dimensional spaces over the past few years. Most recently, Space Pod began as a creative space for me to sit in, to draw in, and to draw onto.

As part of the annual Adur Art Trail in June 2024, The Space Pod was reconstructed in my garden studio (The Artist’s Den). It became an interactive space where visitors were invited to lie and listen to the sounds of space - using NASA recordings of planetary sounds, and the Golden Disc sounds of Earth sent into outer space in 1977 on Voyager. A space to rest, a space to dream. 

Visitors to the Space Pod June 2024
Drawing inside the Space Pod above, whilst listening to sounds of space

Other examples of my dens, spaces, and installations can be seen on the next page or on my website www.katiesollohub.co.uk and on Instagram @katiesollohub

Personal Relationships With Space

Making Spaces (detail) 2023

I have over 12 years of experience working in historic homes. My work has always been about the spaces I visit and inhabit, through drawing, painting, documenting, and making.

I studied Social Anthropology and am fascinated by the universal human relationship to domestic spaces, from the cave to the palace, as well as the ordinary everyday interior. 

My father was himself a refugee (from Imperial Russia), and his own stories, objects, and experiences have left a lasting impression on me and my own relationship to home and space.

The house I was brought up in felt full of ‘ballast’, the stuff of life my father needed to gather and keep around him, as a result of his own childhood loss and displacement, a personal museum.

All of this informs my creative and teaching practices, and I am passionate about sharing this with others through workshops, projects, and exhibitions.

In The Beginning - Drawing Installation 2025

Previous Projects

“Immersed 2021” was a socially engaged project, in which I swam with, talked with, photographed, filmed, and painted over 70 sea swimmers during 2021, during the pandemic.

After the initial project (funded by Arts Council England) finished, the project was further supported by Worthing Borough Council and private sponsorship, culminating in a public exhibition on Worthing Seafront in 2022, seen by thousands of passers-by over a period of 4 months.

Previous projects about Interior Spaces in historic houses include “A Guest in Turner’s House” - An Arts Council Funded residency at JMW Turner’s house, Twickenham, 2014/15, which led to invitations to work in the following locations: 

Normansfield Theatre charcoal drawing 2017

Drawing in Pope’s Grotto 2018

The Blue Bedchamber at Strawberry Hill House, 2016 (won first prize in the Derwent Drawing Prize 2020)