Mentoring

Annie Hogg is a visual artist based in Co. Tipperary, Ireland, where she lives and works with Archy, a Hound.

Her work explores power relations and resources. Aiming to see both human and other than human responses and outcomes in human led situations.

She works with natural materials in traditional and innovative ways within her studio based practice predominantly through sculpture and installation, and has recently begun to incorporate social engagement, sound and moving image.

After receiving a BA in sculpture from Aki College of Art, The Netherlands, she worked on environmental campaigns, studied organic horticulture returning to a full time creative practice in recent years. These tendrils remain important within her visual language.

Annie enjoys delivering engaging workshops, talks and lectures on materials and processes within her own practice and the greater realm of natural colour and material use.

Why Are You Interested In Offering Mentoring?

The act of working with natural materials is an important action. It is activism and holds relevance for own practices and our wider communities. We are at a time where working together is aparamount. This is why I am interested in mentoring. I believe in the cross sharing of ideas , reserach and techniques and see this is a only a positive step forward. Through mentoring, I hope to engage with other practitioner's in meaningful ways to further our collective thoughts and processes.

Mentoring Specialisms

I have mentored around specific themes where engagement with desired materials is relevant to bodies of work and practices, focusing on folklore, ecology and place. I am interested in mentoring where we explore the pushing of our current boundaries within our material practices, and also where we take the basics and deeply explore their nuances.

General Availability

Tuesdays & Thursdays

11am - 1pm, 3pm-5pm GMT

Caroline Ross is an artist, writer and teacher living by the sea in Bournemouth. Her debut book ‘Found and Ground: A Practical Guide to Making your own Foraged Paints’ was published by Search Press in June 2023. She is writing the follow up about ancient and foraged drawing materials, ‘Drawn From the Wild’ to be published spring 2025. Using what nature provides and repurposing what humans discard are a large part of her practice. After the rooks have feasted on the riverbank, the empty mussel shells become paint palettes. The seasonally moulted flight feathers of local swans and geese become quill pens and brushes. Chalk dug out from their setts by badgers is left in piles in the woods, where she gathers it and take it home to make gouache. Caroline makes paints from foraged earth pigments from around the UK, and art tools and inks from natural, wild, and found materials such as oak galls, rusty nails, elderberries, bay leaves and cherry tree gum. The natural fluctuations of materials and the botanical ink stains or ochre paints forming prepared grounds on paper, all suggest forms with which she works.

Why Are You Interested In Offering Mentoring?

I have been mentoring artists via institutions at MFA level, in groups, and one to one, regarding a huge variety of art practices for about 7 years, both in person and remotely via Zoom and email. It is an honour to be able to help people develop their art practice, share insights into integrating natural art materials and to be a confidential sounding board for their creative process. Diverse reasosns people have sought me out include: finishing their art or craft based book, preparing for a degree show, removing plastics from their art practice, deepening their connecting with personal cultural or ancestral threads, having a reliable 'crit' that isn't based only on 'Art-School' Post-Modernist assumptions but includes insights from much older human history as well as the non-human world... I greatly look forward to the conversations and questions that arise when we put our heads, hearts and hands together to make art.

Mentoring Specialisms

I am happy to mentor about any aspects of natural art materials where I have good experience, particularly those in my books. I am also interested in creating art practices outside the academy or mainstream, developing livelihoods that don't harm Earth or each other, and the integration of practical life with one's philosophical or spiritual path.

General Availability

Monday to Friday

9am-1pm, 2pm-5pm, GMT

Greta Desirèe Facchinato (IT/LU) is a research-based multidisciplinary artist and designer. She holds a Masters in Artistic Research from KABK Den Haag (NL) and a Batchelors in Visual and Performance Arts with a specialization in Sculpture from Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia (IT). Through the crossflow of different mediums and the investigation of daily life encounters, gestures, and materials her practice invites us to experience matter from an embodied awareness. She runs a studio focused on research and sustainable education through natural materials, illustration and creative workshops. In 2021 with her project Colour is Alive she researched organic ink making for screen printing. Since then she is been working with the knowledge of color and the interconnection with our environment through the practice of making sustainable ink for printing techniques.

Why Are You Interested In Offering Mentoring?

I’m drawn to mentoring because I find it inspiring to follow other artists' projects and offer guidance grounded in my experience. I believe in sharing knowledge—especially around ecological and craft-based practices that connect past traditions with future possibilities.

Mentoring allows for deeper, more focused exchanges than group teaching. It’s a space to dive into specific questions, refine techniques, and develop personal work with clarity and intention.

With years of experience teaching sustainable, bio-based ink-making across institutions and one-on-one settings, I bring both technical depth and a supportive, research-driven approach to each session.

Mentoring Specialisms I’m happy to mentor around sustainable, bio-based ink-making (both dye and pigment-based), screen printing, natural color processes, and sourcing/transforming plant materials into usable color. I also enjoy supporting artists in developing project ideas, experimental techniques, and finding ways to integrate ecological thinking into their creative practice.

Natalie Stopka is an artist and educator focused on the material history of color and sustainable studio practice. She captures material and elemental interactions in her collaborative, experimental art practice. Her drawings and prints incorporate plant dyes and historical pigments, which provide a seasonally evolving vocabulary of texture and color. Natalie’s freelance studio and dye garden are located in Yonkers, New York. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. www.nataliestopka.com @nataliestopka

Why Are You Interested In Offering Mentoring?

I believe that working closely with natural materials draws us into relationship and respect, opening new possibilities of shared expression and collaboration with each other and the more-than-human world. As an educator and mentor, my goal is to foster embodied material knowledge that acknowledges our ecological and historical entanglement with place. In our virtual studio vistis and constructive conversations, I aim to help mentees connect the threads of research, sparks of inspiration, and hands-on craft that flow into regenerative, prefigurative creative expression.

Mentoring Specialisms:

Botanical dyes and lake pigments, the material history of color production, and interdisciplinary and book arts. My motto is: Materials are what they do.

Lucy Mayes is an artist and pigment maker & researcher working in London and Hampshire. Her work as ‘London Pigment’ uses urban waste stream materials to make recycled pigment. Her practice is centred on the use of unusual, surprising or esoteric raw materials to make colour as a way of documenting events or ‘happenings’. Verdigris made from copper wire stripped from burnt-out mopeds, soot and ash from park fires and construction rubble have all been used in her work to make new pigments. Her colour-making practice centres on creating sustainable pigments from anthropocene waste streams. She works in the capacity of pigment/colour consultant and has worked with Neptune Interiors Ltd, Jaguar Land Rover, Royal Cornwall Museum, V&A, Kew Gardens on pigment projects. She previously worked as product developer and pigment specialist at renowned colourman L.Cornelissen & Son where she developed their historical pigment archive. She teaches pigment making at institutions nationally and hopes to re-orientate our connections to colour; through the creation of intimate relationships with matter formed through embodied making.