The Creatrix Retreat
Brew your mythic imagination
Our retreat invites artists of the land to a creative space of making and building, drawing on Welsh myth and folklore to inspire a spirit of ideation, transformation and birthing. Based on the arc of the Cerridwen myth, the retreat weaves story, song, land and nourishment, with spacious time to work on a creative project, to experiment and change course, and to birth something new.
Brewing
- No Fair Maidens book
- Recording of the Cerridwen story
- Introduction to the weekend's thread
Arrival & Grounding
- Grounding practices
- Opening Circle (bring something from the land you're from)
- Dinner together with reflection: "What does inspiration feel like?"
Inspiration Strikes
- Welcome
- Story Circle & Cerridwen Deep Dive Workshop
- Symbols and Meaning
- Work Time
- Lunch
- Work Time (continued)
- Land Walk
- Dinner
- Evening: Nosen Lowen — stories and songs with Jenna & Kim (around fire?)
Create & Transform
- Opening Circle
- Three rounds of work (iteration, transformation, experimentation)
- Rest — nourishing pause (musician?)
Birthing (Half Day)
- Sharing the work
- Closing Circle
Hosted by Land Art Collective &
Kim Willis
Kim is a writer, storyteller and strategist living between London and South Wales.
Her first book, No Fair Maidens – A Wild Journey With The Lost Goddesses Of Britain, will be published in June 2026 with DoubleDay at Penguin Random House.
Her work is concerned with the relationship between old world mythology and new world imagining. She wants to reanimate the land - particularly on the British Isles - and reweave the stories that might help us overcome the global crises we now face.
Her work has been published in The Guardian, the Independent, in travel magazines and on Substack. She has built creative strategies for Number 10 and the UN. She tells tales around campfires and facilitates new visions for the future with groups. Her work is found in books, boardrooms, fireside chats and festivals.
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Evgenia approaches each place through the practice of deep listening - spending extended time walking, observing, and gathering stories of the land and people. This embodied research informs their studio process, where poetry and visual language merge into works that echo the rhythms of nature. In their calligraphic practice, text often dissolves into organic forms, revealing the interconnectedness of language and landscape.
Evgenia’s work invites reflection on alternative temporalities: forest time, deep time, and proposes art as a vessel for long-term ecological care. Evgenia seeks to create artworks that grow from the land, with the land, and speak back to it, through a process that is both poetic and site-responsive. They aim to create a new body of work rooted in this landscape, in dialogue with its stories, material presence, and more-than-human voices.
Session Facilitators
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Toni Spencer
The Pause
We are performers, artists, activists, dancers, singers, weavers, storytellers, facilitators, and creators who traverse multiple roles as fluidly as we move between artistic disciplines.Our work emerges from the understanding that we are not separate from the natural world but intimately entangled with it. Through place-based improvisation and collaborative devising, we create performances that celebrate living in a female body while acknowledging the complex realities of our time.
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Thresh & Bay
Theatre & Storytelling
We are performers, artists, activists, dancers, singers, weavers, storytellers, facilitators, and creators who traverse multiple roles as fluidly as we move between artistic disciplines.Our work emerges from the understanding that we are not separate from the natural world but intimately entangled with it. Through place-based improvisation and collaborative devising, we create performances that celebrate living in a female body while acknowledging the complex realities of our time.
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Rima Staines
Evening Tales
We are performers, artists, activists, dancers, singers, weavers, storytellers, facilitators, and creators who traverse multiple roles as fluidly as we move between artistic disciplines.Our work emerges from the understanding that we are not separate from the natural world but intimately entangled with it. Through place-based improvisation and collaborative devising, we create performances that celebrate living in a female body while acknowledging the complex realities of our time.
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Elizabeth Gleave
Producer & Facilitator
We are performers, artists, activists, dancers, singers, weavers, storytellers, facilitators, and creators who traverse multiple roles as fluidly as we move between artistic disciplines.Our work emerges from the understanding that we are not separate from the natural world but intimately entangled with it. Through place-based improvisation and collaborative devising, we create performances that celebrate living in a female body while acknowledging the complex realities of our time.
Cerridwen represents the archetypal creatrix. A woman deeply in touch with the forces of nature and able to bend them to her will. A woman of determination and transformation, who slowly kindles new fire. She represents our capacity to patiently and purposefully create possibility. To tend a cauldron in the void; to call on the force of awen until from the quietness of nothing we are ready to birth the new. She's the one who says to you, to me, that birthing is slow work. That for a long time, it can seem as if very little is happening. Until one day, perhaps when you least expect it, it strikes. Lightning.
What This Retreat Offers Your Practice
Ground Your Creative Vision
Arrive grounded and present. Through opening circles and deep listening, connect with the mythic imagination and the forces of nature that drive authentic creative work. Begin to kindle the fire within.
Access the Power of Mythic Narrative
Immerse yourself in the story of Cerridwen and the archetypal creatrix. Learn how symbols, symbols, and deep narrative structure can unlock new dimensions in your creative practice and give your work lasting resonance.
Create in Deep Iteration
Multiple rounds of focused creative work with rest and nourishment woven throughout. Experiment, transform, and iterate in an environment designed to hold and amplify your creative momentum.
Reconnect with Place
Walk the land with intention. Move through the space with presence and deep observation. Let landscape and place inform and anchor your creative work in something real and rooted.
Share Your Work in Circle
Present your work in a held space where you are truly witnessed. Receive feedback from skilled facilitators and fellow artists. Experience the reciprocal exchange that deepens both the work and the maker.
Birth Your Vision into the World
Move from the cauldron of creation into clarity and commitment. Leave with a renewed sense of purpose, tangible work created, and the knowledge that slow work, patient work, is how we birth the new.
Any Questions
If you have any questions about the process, let us know and we will pass them on to your course leader.