Artist · Registered Art Therapist · Workshop Facilitator
Clare Dash is an artist, registered art therapist, and workshop facilitator whose practice spans 25 years of work in the UK and Australia. She works at the intersection of art making, somatic healing, and the creative life.
Her clinical background includes two decades in NHS mental health settings, in acute inpatient wards and community mental health teams working with complex trauma and dissociation.
She is a fully qualified trauma therapist whose heart-centred approach integrates art, spirituality, and parts work: the understanding that every aspect of ourselves, however challenging, carries meaning and deserves compassion. This framework has shaped her belief that genuine healing happens not through fixing what is broken, but through turning towards it with love and curiosity.
She now facilitates experiential workshops, women’s healing circles, and individual somatic creative sessions for artists and non-artists alike. Her authentic, grounded approach invites people to develop self-compassion, reconnect with their own inner wisdom, and transform old wounds into self-understanding.
Her workshop at KArtsCon 2026, Drawing a Healing Dialogue with the Body, introduces bilateral drawing: a somatic practice that uses both hands simultaneously to access the nervous system and let the body speak through mark-making. It requires no artistic skill and is open all.
www.claredash.com · Canterbury
Drawing a Healing Dialogue with the Body: An Experiential Somatic Drawing Workshop
Workshop
This workshop offers an experience of an intimate conversation with your own body. Using bilateral
drawing as a somatic practice the analytical mind softens, and something of our inner world becomes
available in conversation that is beyond words. Bilateral drawing uses both hands simultaneously,
moving together in rhythm, to access the nervous system and allow the body to speak through mark-
making. When both hands move at once, tracing circles, spirals, waves, or any mark the body asks for,
the drawing that emerges is not a product of artistic intention but an embodied conversation.
In this 60 minute experiential workshop, participants will move through a guided body awareness
practice, a bilateral drawing process using both hands, and a brief shared reflection on what emerged.
No artistic skill or art experience is needed for this workshop. A trained artist and someone who hasn’t
touched a pencil in thirty years will have an equally valid experience, because bilateral drawing is not
about producing an image, it is about listening.
Every participant will complete a bilateral drawing and leave with a simple, practice they can do again
on their own, in times of creative block, overwhelm, or simply with the need to reconnect with
themselves. The conversation started here is a beginning to your own embodied healing
transformation.
Open to all. All materials provided.
