Performing & Visual Arts
Arts Retreat with The Sticks in Dorset
Join us for an in-person arts retreat with The Sticks in beautiful Dorset to help fight the winter blues. Dive into creative workshops, and connect with fellow art lovers and nature. Whether you're a pro or just love messing about with paints and crafts, this retreat is all about fun, inspiration, and making cool stuff together in harmony with the natural landscape around us. Don’t miss out on this chance to recharge your creativity in a stunning spot!
At the heart of this retreat is a shared focus on creative practice as a way of observing, understanding and responding to the natural world. Through drawing, mark-making, writing, conversation and quiet study, participants are invited to slow down and pay close attention to the patterns that surround them, in moss and bark, in weathered stone, in shifting light and repeated forms across the landscape.
Inspired by Mwathi’s ink-based practice and the rhythms found in nature, sessions explore repetition, variation and texture as creative tools. Rather than working towards polished outcomes, the emphasis is on process: noticing how patterns form, dissolve and reappear, and how these rhythms echo our own internal states.
Winter provides a powerful backdrop for this retreat. Bare trees and quieter landscapes reflect a natural pause, a moment of rest and preparation before spring returns. Through observing these winter patterns, participants are encouraged to recharge, reflect and gently gather creative energy, using the start of the new year as a time to set intentions without pressure.
This retreat positions creative practice not as production, but as attentiveness: a means of tuning in, recording impressions and building a deeper relationship with place. The intention is to leave with a renewed sensitivity to pattern, seasonality and symbolism, tools that can be carried back into everyday creative life.
Winter reminds us that rest is not the opposite of growth, it is where growth begins!
About the location:
This Victorian conversion provides basic bunk-bed accommodation for up to 12 people and is set on the south coast of the island with its own garden, beach access and views of the Purbeck Hills.
Your journey here will see you cross the seas from Poole Harbour to arrive on this wildlife-rich island where you’ll be greeted by one of our holidays team. After all the visitors go home, make the most of having your very own island. Wander through woodland, explore the heathland and discover Brownsea Island’s bird-filled lagoon. It's in these quieter times that you're more likely to spot the island's red squirrels!
