These retreats offer time and space to deepen your practice through place, material, and process. Each retreat is rooted in a distinct landscape, inviting a slower, more intuitive way of working.
The Lay of the Land: Mapping Memories in Layers
1–3 June 2026 — Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Truro, MA ( FULLY BOOKED/ click on link below to access waiting list)
Join me once again in beautiful Cape Cod for the 19th International Encaustic Conference and a three-day workshop devoted to exploring texture as both surface and story. Working with layered wax, we’ll investigate how ridges, valleys, translucency, and depth can carry memory, emotion, and lived experience.
We’ll begin with mark-making and surface exploration, gradually developing personal “terrains” inspired by natural forms—cliffs, shorelines, hills, and the shifting edges between land and water. Texture becomes a visual language for reflection, growth, and transformation, as we build and excavate our surfaces.
Open to all levels, this workshop offers a supportive introduction for beginners while inviting experienced artists to expand their technical approach and deepen the conceptual potential of their encaustic practice.
👉 For more details or to reserve your space, follow this link
Encaustic retreat in France: Embodied Landscape
14th–22nd Septembre 2026 — A week long retreat in BeArtz, Sauveterre-de-Béarn, Southwest France ( only one space left )
Join me for my immersive retreat in France, Embodied Landscape—a week-long exploration of abstraction through daily drawing, mark making, and encaustic painting, inspired by place, memory, and geological processes. Together, we’ll move beyond literal representation and respond to the landscape through sensation, gesture, texture, and atmosphere. The medieval architecture, river, shifting light, and vast Pyrenean horizons of BeArtz will act as catalysts for creative inquiry rather than subjects to copy.
Each day, I’ll guide you through on-site observation, intuitive sketching, and studio practice. Your drawings will become source material for layered encaustic works as we heat, fuse, scrape, and rework wax—echoing the slow transformations of the earth. This retreat is open to all levels; I offer clear, supportive guidance for beginners and encourage experienced artists to loosen habits and deepen their engagement with abstraction.
We’ll stay in a 1,000-year-old castle perched above a cliffside village, with private room options, most meals included, excursions, and abundant studio time. Arrival is via Biarritz Airport, with regular flights from Ireland and the U.S.
👉 For more details or to reserve your space, follow this link
Encaustic retreat: Luminous Terrain, distilling the Irish Lanscape in Encaustic
12th–19th October 2026 — A week long retreat in Mulranny, county Mayo
Luminous Terrain is a week-long encaustic art retreat in the wild, inspiring landscape of Mulranny, Co. Mayo. Guided by artist Isabelle Gaborit, participants translate the Irish landscape—its light, textures, and forms—into luminous, tactile encaustic artworks. Combining outdoor excursions across bogs, cliffs, and tidal zones with studio practice, the retreat explores layered techniques, intuitive mark-making, and the transformation of sensory impressions into abstract art inspired by place and experience.
👉 For more details or to reserve your space, follow this link
