A Multi-sensory Creative Journey
7 days of art, culture, and creative awakening in Oaxaca.
Explore, Create and Awaken Your Senses Through Art, Culture, and Color
It is an experience that settles into your body, your senses, and your inspiration. Guided by Oaxaca-raised artist Gabriela Domville and UK-based artist David Shillinglaw, you'll explore Oaxaca as a witness — collecting fragments of daily life and translating them into your own creative language. Long after you leave, this journey continues inside your sketchbook, and inside you.
The Experience
Oaxaca is one of the most culturally diverse regions in Mexico — home to dozens of Indigenous cultures, each with its own language, traditions, and ways of understanding the world. Cobblestone streets, vibrant markets, murals, colonial architecture, and ancient ruins form the backdrop of your days.
Each morning begins slowly, with guided creative exercises that help you build and work inside a handmade sketchbook — folding, sewing, layering, pressing, and experimenting. A body map practice deepens your awareness of how colors, textures, sounds, and experiences register physically. David's approach emphasizes exploration over outcome and intuition over perfection.
Beyond the city, Oaxaca's artisan traditions unfold. You'll explore ancient Zapotec sites, witness weaving and candle-making passed down through generations, and visit workshops where fantastical painted creatures come to life. These moments are not about documentation — they are about translating rhythm, craft, and process into your own creative expression.
Meals are an extension of the creative process. Layered moles, corn in countless forms, cacao, mezcal, and local herbs quietly influence mark-making, palette choices, and rhythm. Shared tables create moments of presence and conversation where culture is not observed from a distance but lived, tasted, and woven naturally into the retreat.
Immersion in Oaxaca
Oaxaca is one of the most culturally diverse regions in Mexico — a single state home to dozens of Indigenous cultures, each with its own language, traditions, and ways of understanding the world. Zapotec, Mixtec, Mazatec, Chinantec, Mixe, and many others coexist here, shaping daily life through textiles, architecture, ritual, and food. Cobblestone streets, vibrant markets, murals, colonial architecture, and cultural spaces form the backdrop of your days, while museum visits reveal how pre-Hispanic history and contemporary life continue to converse through pattern, geometry, and color.
Meals are an extension of the creative process. From countryside lunches to rooftop dinners, Oaxacan cuisine shifts from region to region — layered moles, corn in countless forms, cacao, mezcal, and local herbs — quietly influencing mark-making, palette choices, and rhythm. Shared tables create moments of presence and conversation, where culture is not observed from a distance but lived, tasted, and woven naturally into the retreat.
What's Included
All meals from welcome dinner to final breakfast, guided cultural and artisan experiences, daily creative sessions with David, accommodation, transportation, group logistics, and fluent Spanish guidance throughout the week.
Flights, travel insurance, alcoholic beverages, and personal art supplies are not included.
Meet Your Instructors
Gabriela Domville
Oaxaca-Raised Artist • Teacher • Cultural Bridge
For Gabriela, Oaxaca is memory, color, and texture. Fragments of her childhood — spinning tops, piñatas, textiles, colorful seed necklaces from the market, and murals passed down by her grandmother’s hand — weave together with architecture, doors, lintels, urban patterns, and rituals carried through generations. Deeply connected to place, artisans, and local rhythms, she invites you to collect these fragments too, guiding you to translate observation into playful, tactile expression. Throughout the retreat, color, line, and geometry become tools for seeing both the familiar and the new through layered memory, presence, and personal artistic language.
David Shillinglaw
UK Artist • Bookmaker • Muralist
For David, a sketchbook is home base — a living companion where ideas are tested, mistakes are welcomed, and curiosity leads the way. His practice centers on making books as evolving objects, spaces to think, experiment, deliberately fail, and let ideas bloom without the pressure of conclusions. Throughout the week, he’ll guide you to loosen your grip on perfection, trust your intuition, and allow your sketchbook to respond to the world around you. Each day, it becomes a vessel for capturing the energy of Oaxaca — the food, the conversations, the morning light, and the colors and textures that spark your senses. By the end of the week, you’ll leave with a full sketchbook that reflects not only what you saw, but how you experienced it.
YOUR WEEK IN OAXACA
Day 1 – Arrival & Welcome
You arrive in Oaxaca and begin to settle into its rhythm. Colors, sounds, and scents greet you before you even unpack. We gather for a welcome dinner to meet one another, share intentions, and ease into the week ahead. The sketchbook opens for the first time — not to perform, but to notice.
Day 4 – Artisan Villages & Ancient Wonders
Mitla, Teotitlán del Valle, weaving, candle-making, and El Tule.Beyond the city, artisan villages open conversations across generations. Weaving, candle-making, and ancient sites reveal how material, repetition, and ritual carry memory. Countryside flavors and open space soften the pace, feeding both reflection and mark-making.
Day 2 – Sketchbook Workshop & First Explorations
The day begins with a sketchbook workshop led by David. You explore the book as a living object — a place for risk, play, layering, and experimentation. Later, you wander through streets and markets, letting murals, textures, music, and movement guide your hand. The city begins to enter your pages.
Day 5 – Oaxaca City Immersion
Back in Oaxaca, markets and museums reveal contemporary perspectives alongside tradition. Doors, shadows, and urban geometry become quiet teachers. A rooftop dinner brings view, flavor, and conversation together, allowing inspiration to unfold naturally.
Day 7 – Reflection & Farewell
We begin the day at Monte Albán, where scale, silence, and ancient geometry invite reflection. After time to wander freely back in the city, we gather at Criollo for a closing meal and shared stories. David leads a final integration exercise, helping you recognize how your sketchbook has become a living record of the week — and a practice you carry forward.
Day 3 – Santo Domingo & Cultural Gems
We continue building your sketchbook practice with David’s guidance, adding layers, rhythm, and depth. Baroque altars, courtyards, and the geometry of Santo Domingo invite slower observation, while the Ethnobotanical Garden reveals how nature and history intertwine. Seasonal food grounds the day.
Day 6 – Alebrijes, Weaving & Black Clay Magic
Workshops in alebrijes, weaving, and black clay highlight imagination shaped by hand. Color stories and symbolic forms invite new approaches. By now, sketchbooks are layered, worn, and alive — reflecting a shared rhythm of curiosity and discovery.
Day 8 – Departure
The morning is unhurried. Over breakfast, final conversations unfold — plans exchanged, sketchbooks flipped open one last time. Hugs replace handshakes, and Oaxaca slowly releases you back into the world. You leave carrying more than memories: a way of seeing, a rhythm of attention, and a practice ready to continue wherever you land.
WHY THIS RETREAT IS DIFFERENT
This retreat invites you to live inside the act of making. Rather than aiming for perfect drawings or finished outcomes, the focus is on presence, curiosity, and process. You’ll hand-build a sketchbook that travels everywhere with you, filling it with layers of color, texture, collage, writing, pattern, and marks gathered directly from your surroundings. Mistakes are not corrected — they’re welcomed. Chaos becomes a form of language. Intuition is trusted.
Instead of observing Oaxaca from the outside, you experience it as a welcomed guest. Your sketchbook becomes a living archive of taste, movement, conversation, architecture, and emotion — a personal map of discovery you can return to long after the retreat ends.
WHO THIS RETREAT IS FOR
This retreat is for those who long to rediscover the joy of making without pressure — to sketch, play, experiment, and follow curiosity wherever it leads. It’s for people who see the world through texture, color, and pattern, and who crave inspiration rooted in real life: bustling markets, quiet courtyards, handmade objects, shared meals, and stories embedded in place.
Whether you’ve been making art for decades or are returning to a sketchbook after a long pause, this experience offers time, beauty, and permission. You’ll be supported within a warm, curious group — learning together, sharing discoveries, and witnessing each other’s creative evolution.
WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED
• Flights to and from Oaxaca
• Travel insurance (strongly recommended)
• Alcoholic beverages and specialty coffees
• Personal shopping or souvenirs
• Art supplies and personal materials
