Discover the wild edges of your creative practice using your body, voice, and imagination with the brilliant guidance of leading, creative luminaries and artists from around the world.
Creative Expression
Watercolour and the Art of Seeing
With David McEown
May 7 - 11, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Explore watercolour’s magical flowing spontaneity and essential techniques as you paint directly from nature. Enhance your perception, way of “seeing”, and connectedness to the earth with this travel-friendly medium. Enjoy a dynamic watercolour demonstration; exploring paint as a form of meditation and play. Uncover the secret hydrodynamics of watercolour paint…
Tending The Fire Within: A Creative Journaling Journey
With Jenn Forgie
May 11 - 15, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
"I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back..." - Oriah Mountain Dreamer, "The Invitation" Tending the Fire Within is…
Write from Your Heart
With Susan Musgrave
May 16 - 21, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional” - attributed to the Dalai Lama. It is hard work, when we are grieving, not to suffer; suffering — personal and universal — has become a condition of how we live. Writing, especially poetry, fiction, journaling and memoir, has always been a place where…
Sketch by Sketch: connecting with the world through drawing
With Emma FitzGerald
May 16 - 21, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Learn to sketch without fear of making mistakes! Join celebrated author/illustrator, Emma FitzGerald as she leads participants through a series of exercises that build confidence and improves observation skills, while allowing for the happy accidents that make a drawing that speaks from the heart. Using pen and watercolour paint, and…
Resonance: A Deep Listening, Somatic Retreat
With Charlie Gates and Kiko Pace
May 30 - June 4, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Join Charlie and Kiko for an offering of Deep Listening and feeling as we gather in the belly of Spring on Cortes Island. From sound baths, reflective journaling, meditative movement practices, and Somatic Dreaming® - we venture to explore and expand our relationship to ways of listening, receiving, and generating…
Dance of Connection
With Bettina Rothe
June 8 - 13, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Come home to yourself, find connection and nourishment in community, and with the land. Together we take refuge in our primary language "rhythm", and find belonging in the dance. Expand your repertoire of how you can connect with others on the dance floor and in life. Release old patterns of…
Contemplative Mind, Spontaneous Brush: Ink, Colour and Japanese Washi Papers
With Heather Midori Yamada
June 22 - 27, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Relax body, breath and mind with short guided meditations and simple perceptual exercises. Follow brushwork demonstrations using Japanese sumi ink and watercolour on various Japanese washi papers (provided). Inspired by the natural beauty of Cortes Island, we will explore mixed media approaches of layering, tearing and collaging. Deep intuitive and…
Singing in the Vocal River
With Rhiannon
July 6 - 11, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Hear your own song and learn new ones as you find your place in the world of music and invention. Co-create vocal magic in a safe, dynamic circle of singers, delving into the possibilities of spontaneous composition and the language of storytelling. Working alone, in pairs, and in ensemble, meld…
Dancing from the Inside Out
With Margie Gillis
July 6 - 11, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Move into your body’s experiential wisdom and reveal the soul in motion. Refine your sensitivity to the connection between thought, feeling, spirit and body as you listen in to your body’s inner wisdom, impulses, conversations and emotions. Becoming sensitive to and engaging with this inner life provides information both for…
Slow Art, Somatic Practice, and Creative Rest
With Shauna Kaendo, Registered Art Therapist | BFA, RCAT and Trudi Smith, Registered Clinical Counsellor | MC, MA, PhD
July 11 - 16, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Being in conversation with art, process, and our bodies. In this therapeutic arts program, we offer a blend of creative care practices…getting curious about what that can look and feel like, both individually and in community. Through creative meanderings with solo and collective art-making processes like bilateral drawing, stick brush…
Becoming One with the Spirit of the Drum
With Gordy Onayemi Ryan and Zoë Ryan
July 25 - 30, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Activate the Fire in your hands, the Beat in your feet, and the Song in your Heart on this soulful journey in Rhythm in the iconic Olatunji Hall. Drum, dance and sing to increase the flow of vital energy in your body and open your ears to the beauty of…
Locus Amoenus: Exploring Organic and Artificial Systems in Art
With Rebecca Brewer and Veit Laurent Kurz
July 25 - 30, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Together we navigate an urgent inquiry and reflect on dynamic processes of renewal and the power of generative frameworks in the organic and digital realm: How can we, as physical beings in an increasingly digital world, reclaim the intimate, tactile gestures of our hands? Can we react to the vast,…
Between the Human Animal & the Animate Earth
With David Abram
July 25 - 30, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
How can we open a fresh and unshakeable solidarity between ourselves and the other animals, plants, and elemental forces that compose this breathing biosphere? The deepening contortions of climate change – intensifying droughts, monster floods, flaring wildfires and heart-wrenching geopolitical cataclysms – all ensure that our species is tumbling toward…
Nature Paints Itself
With Jeremy Herndl
July 25 - 30, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
What if the world created us humans to speak its names, sing its rivers and winds? What if nature paints itself, using our deft human hands and the tactility of sight to emulate its textures, colours and spaces? In this workshop we shall enter the space of nature, the garden,…
Science, Art, Sound & the Sacred
With Merlin Sheldrake and Cosmo Sheldrake
July 30 - August 3, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Apr 30, 2025.
Explore the entanglements between science, art, sound, and the sacred in a beautiful, wild setting. What we call art and science both arise from our faculties of imagination, wonder, and curiosity. We will spend part of our time outdoors – in gardens, on seashores and in forests – connecting with…
Kintsugi: Embracing Imperfection
With Yuka Morino
September 21 - 25, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Jun 22, 2025.
Kintsugi, 金継ぎ translated literally from Japanese means "golden joinery". This traditional Japanese art used to repair broken ceramics uses natural materials, like tree sap or urushi lacquer dusted with gold (or other precious metals) to make the cracks, or broken lines beautiful. The cracks are called Keshiki 景色 and in…
Fish as Storytellers: Intangible Knowledge and Lived Practices
With Zoe Todd and Courtney Chetwynd
October 2 - 6, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Jul 3, 2025.
Drawing inspiration from fish as storytellers in their own right, this workshop will explore storytelling, play, and artistic creation as tools for sense-making. Through interactive dialogue, collective visioning sessions, collaborative art-making, and land-based reflection, participants will explore how diverse relationships in their lives give rise to profound knowledge in storied…