1-1 Mentoring

For Printing & Painting On Textiles Programme Members

To support participants in deepening their creative practices. Rooted in community, material experimentation, and sustainable approaches, it offers one-to-one support with experienced mentors to guide, challenge, and encourage artistic development. Mentors, as practicing makers with in-depth knowledge of their own processes, can support mentees in pushing their work further. 

While sessions are tailored to the individual, mentees are encouraged to bring questions, recent work, or specific challenges in order to get the most from each session.

How To Sign Up: Join the Printing & Painting On Textiles Course to access the sign-up page.

The Mentor Role:

  • This is not a teaching role: the mentor acts as a guide, advisor, and supporter.

  • Offering constructive feedback (both positive and negative) 

  • Asking open questions to help the mentee go through to their own process of enquiry. 

  • A supportive role where mentees feel comfortable asking questions and sharing their concerns. 

  • Helping mentees set goals and track progress.

  • Active listening to the concerns and needs of their mentees, showing empathy and understanding.

Reasons for seeking mentoring

  • Sustainability & Materials: Structured support to transition studios and practices to more sustainable, natural-material-based approaches.

  • Creative Focus: Moving from experimentation to developing a cohesive body of work with clear direction and personal style.

  • Mentorship & Community: With experienced, like-minded artists.

  • Confidence & Motivation: Building confidence, overcoming hesitation, and carving out dedicated time for creative practice.

  • Professional Growth: Supporting creatives to develop professionally.

  • Mentoring is not teaching: While there’s a strong desire to build technical knowledge in natural dyes, pigments, and their applications across various media. By adding the mentoring as an aside to the course programme, the desire for receiving teaching should be met by the course, keeping the mentoring sessions for mentoring, not teaching.

Meet the Mentors

  • Greta Facchinato

    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.

    General Availability

    TBC

    Number of Mentees: 3

  • Caroline Ross

    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

    Number of Mentees: 2

Pricing:

3 x One Hour Sessions To be completed within the duration of the year long course

Three monthly payments of £90 or one payment of £270

How To Join: Join the Printing & Painting On Textiles Course to access the sign-up page.

Cancellations and rescheduling 

  • This programme requires the mentees to commit to the three sessions. This programme is only viable with the commitment of everyone involved to the pre-agreed plan. 

  • If unexpected circumstances change mentors and mentees availability, they can communicate directly to rearrange sessions. We ask that the mentors and mentees try to stick to the pre-arranged times as much as possible as too much rescheduling can be time consuming to manage.

  • Cancellations are possible up to one month before delivery.

Public Liability & Insurance

  • All professional practitioners should have their own public liability insurance. If you are in the UK, I recommend a-n membership which includes insurance.

  • Mentees are responsible for their own safety and should follow all safety instructions provided.