Creative Expression

Website graphic

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.

khari facilitation activate

Together: A Gathering for Facilitators (Vancouver)

With Khari Wendell McClelland, SFU Continuing Studies and Hollyhock Leadership Institute

March 3 - 5, 2025
Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue
Skillful facilitation has the capacity to transform spaces and communities. There's a special kind of power that is felt when people come together in circle, to speak truth, and to practice better ways of being in dialogue. Building on the success of its inaugural offering, Hollyhock Leadership Institute, in partnership…

Watercolour and the Art of Seeing

With David McEown

May 7 - 11, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Feb 5, 2025.
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…

Write from Your Heart

With Susan Musgrave

May 16 - 21, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Feb 14, 2025.
“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…
Beacon Hill Park by Emma Fitzgerald from

Sketch by Sketch: connecting with the world through drawing

With Emma FitzGerald

May 16 - 21, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Feb 14, 2025.
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…

Writing The Great Turning: Climate Writing

With Jess Serrante and Zoe Young

May 25 - 30, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Feb 23, 2025.
Discover your path to climate action with creative writing and deep emotional learning.  The climate crisis affects all of us, but showing up to this fight will mean healing ourselves as much as it means healing the planet. Creative writing is a powerful tool for looking our grief in the…

Resonance: A Deep Listening, Somatic Retreat

With Charlie Gates and Kiko Pace

May 30 - June 4, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Feb 28, 2025.
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…

Love Actually: Learning to Balance Power and Love

With Deepa Narayan, Eric Mulholland and Peggy Taylor

June 8 - 12, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Mar 9, 2025.
Hollyhock’s core purpose, since its origin, has been inner transformation for outer change in community with others. A place for body, mind and spirit renewal. This workshop draws from mystics, philosophers, neuroscience, psychology and community arts practices to explore the ideas of power and love as the foundational drives of…

Dance of Connection

With Bettina Rothe

June 8 - 13, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Mar 9, 2025.
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…

Places, Sounds, Portals, Worlds: A Soundscape Ecology Immersion

With Rebecca Bruton and Edzi’u

June 8 - 13, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Mar 9, 2025.
Open new portals to creativity and collaboration amidst the planetary spheres of sound, music, and landscape. In this interdisciplinary eco-arts residency, participants will be introduced to conceptual ideas about collaborating ethically with landscapes and soundscapes, and learn a variety of approaches for generating sound, music, text, and performance compositions with/in…

Contemplative Mind, Spontaneous Brush: Ink, Colour and Japanese Washi Papers

With Heather Midori Yamada

June 22 - 27, 2025
Hollyhock Cortes Island
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Mar 23, 2025.
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…