Enbodied Landscape
Encaustic Painting Workshop
w/ Isabelle Gaborit
Saturday & Sunday
26th & 27th April 2025
10am to 5pm
€360
Workshop Overview
Embark on a transformative journey with the "Embodied Landscape" workshop, a process-driven exploration of mark-making and gestures as a creative practice. This immersive experience will delve into the profound connection between our physical environment, natural forces, and the expressive potential residing within each participant.
Inspiration from Coastal Mayo
The rugged beauty of the western seashores of County Mayo will serve as our canvas, providing inspiration from the naked shores, dramatic skies, and the timeless ruggedness of the stones. Through this workshop, participants will engage with their immediate environment, translating its essence into a unique visual language.
Sketching and Drawing Practice
Isabelle Gaborit will lead participants in a daily sketching and drawing practice. This process serves as a foundation, informing encaustic paintings by exploring mark-making and gestures. The goal is to cultivate an embodied experience of the surroundings, capturing a visual memory of place—its forms, colours, textures, and patterns.
Transmutation into Encaustic Paintings
Back in the studio, emotional responses will be transmuted into encaustic paintings. This intuitive process relies on trust, allowing each mark and gesture to be stored in the artist's hand and body, becoming tangible within the cooling wax. Participants will witness the alchemical transformation of their observations into unique works of art.
Techniques and Geological Inspiration
Isabelle will demonstrate various encaustic painting techniques, drawing parallels between geological activity and artistic expression. Emphasizing the physicality of natural processes such as erosion, deposition, weathering, and relief, participants will engage in building up, scraping back, heating, cooling, scoring, shaping, and layering. Mimicking geological processes aims to reveal stories and records embedded in highly tactile surfaces.
Skill Levels and Techniques
Participants of all skill levels—absolute beginners and developing artists alike—will be exposed to basic, intermediate, and advanced techniques in working with encaustic medium. Isabelle will guide everyone toward creative growth, offering a comprehensive learning experience.
Outcome
Engage with the light-filled ruggedness of County Mayo, generate new visions, and acquire the skills needed for creative growth when the landscape becomes the teacher, and your creations become a testament to the profound dialogue between artist and environment.
Class Details
Subjects covered during the two days:
Resources on safety, ventilation, correct working temperatures and equipment
Appropriate supports and grounds, palette, brushes, colours and studio set up
Daily sketching and mark-making diaries
Different ways to apply paint & fusing options
How to achieve a smooth/textured surface
How to achieve translucency/opacity
Mark making: Inscribing/etching/sgraffito/scraping technique
Relief and textural techniques
(Cavo-rilieveo, dripping, splattering, accretions...)
What to bring with you
Bring notebooks, tablets or laptops for drawings and a camera if you need to take images.
Accommodation available if required - Please contact us directly
“Isabelle Gaborit is a professional visual artist with a BA (Hons), originally from La Rochelle in the southwest of France, and currently residing in Ireland. Her artistic journey began with a foundation in sculpture, drawing and painting at l’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Poitiers, France. In 2006 she graduated with an honours degree in fine arts in Ireland.
Since then, Isabelle’s artistic endeavours have taken her on a dynamic path of national and international exhibitions, showcasing her work in locations such as the USA, Northern Ireland, China and France.
A former member of Artspace in Galway and G126, she is also one of the founding members of Art In Studio, East Clare artist studios trail. She is also a member of International Encaustic Artists ( IEA).
As a contemporary artist, Isabelle’s chosen medium is encaustic, an ancient form that resonates with the depth of time. Her artistic journey intertwines seamlessly with her daily sketching routine, where she delves into mark-making and gesture. Through this practice, she absorbs the essence of her surroundings, weaving together the visual memory of place—its forms, colours, textures, and patterns.
The transmutation of these experiences finds expression in Isabelle’s paintings, not through overt consciousness but as a manifestation of the embodiment of her encounters in her hands and body. A profound fascination with geological processes, shaped by time and weather, drives her artistic exploration. She is drawn to the layers that build up over time, gradually revealed by the relentless forces of nature, so prominent in the west of Ireland.
In her studio located between lake and sea at the threshold of Connemara, Isabelle emulates these geological processes in her artmaking. Each painting undergoes a series of stages, mirroring the natural forces that mould landscapes—construction, destruction, growth, and decay. Much like an archaeological process, her paintings evolve through the physicality of layering pigmented beeswax, scraping it back while cooled, scoring, and shaping. This intricate technique results in highly tactile surfaces that invite viewers to explore the nuanced history embedded within each work.”