Workshops
I lead workshops in various contexts and settings from creative workshops in painting, drawing and collage through to exploratory mapping workshops and site-specific community engagement projects. This page shows examples of the range of workshops I offer.
Painting & Drawing
I run an online course called “Journeys in Abstract Art”, which covers practical skills and techniques in drawing and painting as well as introducing innovative processes for making artworks. Throughout the course students develop their own visual language as well as exploring ideas and concepts within their artwork.
Drawing inspiration from modern and contemporary abstract artists, including my own art practice, we explore the methods, processes, tools and techniques used by artists. We dive into the principles of colour theory, composition, colour mixing and layering, and we experiment with creating art in a range of wet and dry mediums including acrylic paint, coloured pencil, graphite, pastels, ink and watercolour as well as mixed media artworks and collage.
The course is taught online with presentations, demonstrations, practical activities, group discussion time, plus there is an online Padlet space for personalised feedback. We explore the use of colour, line, form and gesture, as well as using more experimental methods about attuning to the senses, listening to your intuition, and expressing things that cannot be put into words.
The course ethos is about the joy of experimentation and exploration, rather than on mastering a particular medium. Ultimately this journey is about gaining confidence to play and experiment with materials, and to develop your unique form of expression.
You may already have some experience of painting and drawing and want to try out something new, or you might never have picked up a paintbrush before – either way you will be welcome on the course. Whether you make purely abstract or more representational art, the tools and strategies we develop during the course are applicable to all forms of visual art making.
Please note this course is currently only offered for people who live in York via York Learning but I am looking into options of running an online course independently starting early 2026. Please join my mailing list and drop me a message if you would be interested in finding out more or joining this course.
“I’ve found Kimbal an inspiring and talented teacher and will be able to carry what I’ve learnt into my future painting.”
“After week one I noticed that I really needed to loosen up a lot and began to take in the information around me I was basically still copying from nature but by week three I had begun to use colour differently and paint in shapes and colours which I had not used for a long time... Throughout the course the feedback has been amazing and I looked forward to each class”
“a really inspiring and confidence boosting course”
I also offer bespoke one-to-one private tuition, either in-person or online, for those who wish to explore and develop their artistic practice across a variety of media.
Sessions are tailored specifically to needs, aims and ambitions and open to beginners and more experienced artists alike.
Please contact me for further information.
Children and families
I lead workshops for children and families. For example, I led a series of mixed media mapping workshops for children and families as part of the National Gallery summer learning programme in 2025. The workshops took inspiration from the painting “The courtyard of a house in Delft” by Pieter de Hooch (1658), in the gallery’s collection - a painting rich in architectural details of a domestic setting. Children and their families were asked to consider this painting in relation to their own home context, thinking about textures and details that they see, hear and feel around them.
I created an audio piece of sounds I recorded at home and on the streets of London - the sounds of breakfast being prepared, washing plates and cat feeding time blended with the sounds of busses, bikes, birds and building sites. Using textural materials, and printed out photos local brick patterns and paving slabs, kids (and their adults) created multi-media collages and 3D sculptures based their own home, fantasy dream home, or memories of a place they have been before.
Another example of a children’s workshop is a mapping workshop I did with kids from Het Buurtatelier, in Amsterdam (2016)
“Dit is mijn buurt”, was a workshop where children drew their favourite places in the neighbourhood and then collaged them onto collective maps using drawing and collage with transparent plastic sheets.
Collage
I’ve always been a little obsessed about collage, although I have never really taken it up as a main art form. I think that the physical aspect of cutting and layering paper lends itself perfectly to the ideas I explore around sites, memories and maps. Here is an example of a workshop I led as part of the Palimpsest Projects event programme curated by Gina DeGagna (Richmond Library, London, 2025). We explored details in the local neighbourhood through journeys with our mind’s eye, and then used a selection of fabulous old maps (re-printed) and some vibrant art magazines, to reimagine the neighbourhood based on personal experiences and encounters.
Experimental Mapping
Maps and mapping are central to my artistic practice - I am interested in how spaces and places can be represented in alternative or abstract ways. I see a map not so much as a fixed document that shows how, or what a place is, but rather as a trace of living and evolving circumstances that morph along with the people who live it, through their stories, dreams and imaginations.
I apply the methods and ideas that I work with in my practice through my mapping workshops in different contexts and sites. I have led workshops for students, academics, artists and the generally curious across the fields of art, architecture, geography and health, and also as part of site-specific research projects in collaboration with various communities and groups.
My mapping workshops generally focus on mapping as a creative process rather than a means to produce an end result. The workshops are about capturing and attuning to embodied experience of a place, and what you learn and discover through the process of making, rather than creating a definitive documentation of something. The workshops could lead to the creation of artworks or artefacts that can be seen or experienced by others, or they could function as a form of personal or collective healing for those who participate in the sessions by gaining a deeper understanding of their embodied relationships to place and memory.
Drawing forms one of main activities in these workshops. For instance we might draw maps of journeys that we make with our mind’s eye. We might re-construct memories of places we know, or we might make marks in response to the feeling of touch or the sensation of sound in the place we are in now.
Mapping sensations
“Drawing is a physical act that we do with our bodies, and is therefore well situated to explore the relationships between the materiality of spaces and the physicality of being a body somewhere. ”
I have led numerous workshops on the themes of mapping the sensations of the body, particularly focussing on feeling and hearing.
For example, I led workshops as part of the Body Worlds: Health Mapping series, which was a collaboration between Livingmaps Network and the Healthy Scepticism Project at Kings College London (2024 and 2025) for healthcare professionals and mapper-artists to share methodological approaches.
My workshop explored how we can use drawing to attune to our physical environments and create maps of what is going on both inside and outside our bodies. We drew interpretive marks in response to the sounds around us, and then, after lunch, mapped the feeling of our digestive systems!
Body Worlds: Health Mapping Workshops (KCL 2025)
In another example of sensory mapping, I led an online session for Early Childhood Studies students and members of the FEELed lab at the University of British Columbia Okanagan (2024).
Drawing inspiration from Tim Ingold’s theories around mapping as a trace of encounters, and Sylvia Kind’s research on children’s mark making as meaningful traces of embodied knowledge, students were asked to consider how they could draw ‘feelingly’ in response to the environment around them.
The workshop involved remote exploration of their own neighbourhoods whilst ‘co-contaminating’ each other’s processes by sending images and text via an online portal.
Examples of works by Isabel Porter and Khezie Gibbons
Mapping the experience of place
Exploring places both in the mind, and physically out in the street is a big part of my experimental mapping work.
During an Artist Residency at Twiza, Tunis (2014) I developed a collaborative mapping activity inspired Guy Debord’s concept of the dérive. The workshop involved the purposefully absurd task of mapping a journey in a small space - ie, the route they took to come to the workshop, their movements through the room since they arrived or the motions of their toothbrush in their mouth as they brushed their teeth that morning.
We then used the maps to ‘de-navigate’ and explore the historic medina of Tunis in unconventional ways, to see what the map might enable us to discover.
Participants interpreted arbitrary marks in their map drawings in relation to the complex and confusing winding streets of the Medina, getting lost and stopping in places they might not have otherwise stopped. As they walked, they drew things they saw, noted down overheard conversations and collected paper items they found on the street.
We then used these materials to create a collective collage map, which was exhibited at Twiza at the end of my residency.
Mapping the Medina, Twiza (2014)
Unmapping
Unmapping is a project and methodology that emerged out of workshops like the one mentioned above. During an artist residency at Kosaten, Tokyo in 2019 I led a series of workshops that explored people’s embodied experience of place, and the roles that fiction, imagination and memory in maps and map making.
To un-map something is to de-couple and to re-connect, to re-arrange, find new pathways and new connections. I was interested to explore the neighbourhood of the community centre where I was based for the residency, both through the eyes of people who knew the place well and those like myself who were visitors.
The activity I led involved touch drawing in pairs. One person drew a map of a place they knew, via touch, onto the others arm, whilst the other drew the sensation they could feel.
The drawings that were created were then used as maps to navigate walks around the neighbourhood (similarly to what we did in Tunis), interpreting the lines and marks in the drawing in relation to the geography around us. By drawing and exploring together with others, we discovered details in the streets that were both familiar and unfamiliar, whilst learning about ourselves and about each other.
“Unmapping” workshop at Kosaten, Tokyo (2019)
Multi-Modal workshops
Ruptured Atlas (2024)
As part of the development phase of the Ruptured Atlas project, Dr Sana Murrani and I led a series of Multi-Modal mapping workshops for participants in the project. We worked with a group of displaced Yazidis living in IDP camps for the past 10 years following the ISIS perpetrated genocide in Şingal (Sinjar) in 2014. These workshops function as training sessions to introduce methods and techniques for participatory mapping that we would go on to use in the project. It was important for us to demonstrate to those who would eventually do the mapping, that map making was about something more than just documenting where something is, but more about trying to capture the embodied and emotional experience of place using a variety of methods.
The workshops were carried out online with homework missions to test the methods. The workshops covered Deep Listening and Interviewing, drawing and cognitive Mapmaking, GIS storytelling, photographing and filmmaking, sound recording and finally sharing and multimedia storytelling
Below are some examples of drawings, collages and maps made by participants in the project.
To discover more about this project, please visit the Ruptured Atlas website: https://ruptured-atlas.shorthandstories.com/ruptured-atlas/
Here we see a collage of Ibrahim’s drawings and maps of home pre-2014 and paintings and images depicting the Yazidi plight in the years following. Saada’s drawing of light switches in her new home compares how the new house she has ended up living in differs from the exposed wiring in her previous home in the village. And Omeed’s street in 2024 compared with the aftermath of ISIS atrocities in Ba’ashiqa in 2014.
Site specific projects
I also run participatory mapping workshops as part of qualitative and site-specific research projects working with specific community stakeholders. Here are a few examples of these kinds of workshops.
Growing up in Coastal Towns (2025)
I led a series of workshops alongside artist and researcher Jina Lee for the “Growing up in Coastal towns” project 2025 (Avril Keating, UCL and Livingmaps Network).
The project collected and mapped young people’s experiences of growing up in coastal towns around the UK today, in comparison to the experience of older generations.
Through participatory mapping activities such as drawing the journeys they would take to go to school, where they would go to hang out with friends and where they imagined they might live or work in the future, we were able to map both the changed experience of what it means to grow up by the sea in the UK now in comparison to the 1960’s. The project shed light on lived experience and insights into the hopes, fears and future aspirations of the younger generation.
Royal Docks Design Guides Workshops (2020)
I ran workshops for the Royal Docks Development Team to help create design guides for street furniture and public spaces in the London Royal Docks redevelopment. I worked with three local community groups, gathering their views on what they liked and disliked about the area now, and what they wanted it to be like after the redevelopment. We used mapping, drawing, and walking activities, both online and in person.
Outdoor walk-and-draw sessions involved walking through the old dockland area, paying attention to sounds and the atmosphere, and drawing what we felt. We visited key spots, focused on interesting or unsettling details, and used drawing to show our personal experience of the space. We collected the materials that were produced on the walk and created an annotated collage map with reflections and ideas.
Online sessions with local residents involved imagining a walk through the neighborhood on a set route while drawing what they expected to see. I asked participants to focus on visual or sensory details that made them feel good—colours, shapes, textures, things worth keeping—as well as anything problematic or unattractive.
Photos: Tian-Khee Siong
Are we that map? (2023)
Are we that map was a series of R+D workshops aimed at developing inclusive participatory map-making workshops which actively included and engaged children and young people with a lived experience of learning disabilities/difficulties (LD/D). The project was a partnership between Rosetta Arts, purpleSTARS, RIX Centre, University of East London (UEL) and Living Maps Network. Working together we devised, delivered, reviewed and refined a Map Making workshop package in which people with LD/D developed and facilitated, working to their strengths alongside other expert artists and educators. We developed a range of activities including sensory drawing, mapping with clay, smell maps, feeling maps and sound maps.
