A workshop with Katie Sollohub is an exciting event at Hampshire Art studio. We know she will take us and the students to an entirely new experience of drawing, memory, space and calm. Whatever description we offer of Katie’s courses the experience is always richer and more exciting.

This summer Katie is using the chalk stream, the river Dever, that passes in front of the Hampshire Art studio as her starting point. We strongly recommend you take a leap of faith and try the River, a Drawing Meditation workshop.

Katie looks at the world intensely, noticing everything, making connections, finding narratives. Her work records the process of looking, crossing through time and space, drawing on memory and history. VIEW CV

“I like to bring things alive through my creative practice, animating objects and spaces. My eyes reach out like an octopus’s tentacles, my hands and body follow, with gesture and movement, leaving traces of this experience of looking as marks on the page. Observation, sound and touch help me feel present, anchoring me in a place from where I can dream.” 

In much of her work she tells stories, drawing out the spirit of a person, place or thing. Boundaries of time and space dissolve – a curtain blows in the open window, a door ajar, trees and clouds float into the room, objects appear to have been just put down by an absent hand. There is a sense that something is about to happen. 

In other work she is marking time through ritual and routine, working in series about everyday things and activities, connecting her daily practice of meditation to the creative process.

Katie’s work has been selected for the Discerning Eye, Lynne Painter Stainers Prize, Royal Academy Summer show, Jerwood Drawing Prize. In 2020 she was awarded 1st prize in the Derwent Drawing Prize for The Blue Bedroom, selected for Wells Contemporary and Broadway Arts Exhibition, and Glyndebourne Festival Exhibition.

---

At Christmas in 2021 we drew a table laden with food as the winter afternoon light faded and eventually candles were lit. The warm embrace and communal spirit of the Bransbury studio was captured in a series of wonderful pictures. I’m sure everyone involved will remember that afternoon and the feast that followed.