Kinship Workshop
Kinship with council staff, 2024. Photo by Simon Ellis
What is Kinship Workshop?
Kinship Workshop is a series of nature-centred workshops guided by artists Tom Goodwin and Katye Coe. Participants explore their relationship to nature through sensing, moving and reflection. These grounding physical practices ‘tune the senses to our environment – especially the non-visual senses’. They open new pathways for participants to deepen their connections to nature, to the landscape and to others (both human and non-human species).
Kinship Workshop in action
As a continuation of their 2023 residency at Orleans House Gallery, Tom and Katye were invited by Richmond and Wandsworth Borough Councils to run an extended Kinship Workshop for council staff in 2024. The programme looks at how embodied practices in nature might bring nature-centred thinking and wellbeing into organisational structures.
The invitation to run an extended Kinship Workshop came after a highly successful pilot programme. Participants noted the ‘team bonding element’ of the programme helped in their ‘day-today work in terms of problem solving’. They said it gave their team space to ‘open up ourselves to possibility and to think in a completely different way’ than is typical in an office setting.
Past Kinship Workshop and residency
Tom and Katye’s year-long residency included a Kinship Workshop based in and around Orleans House Gallery in May, June and into the autumn of 2023. The residency took place within the context of our Cultural Reforesting programme.
Tom and Katye ran several Kinship events for the public during their residency:
Contributors and collaborators to Kinship Workshop’s residency included dance artist Holly Thomas, group facilitator and psychotherapist Chand Starin Basi, facilitator and doula Poh-Eng San, dance artist-researcher Natifah White, and 2023 placements dance artists Becky Horne and Sophie Holland.
About the Kinship Workshop team
Kinship Workshop facilitator and founder Tom Goodwin has a background in various movement practices and somatic trainings including dance, martial arts and bodywork, and has extensive experience in teaching and facilitation.
Kinship Workshop draws from his experiences of spending time with animals both in sanctuaries and through wild and domestic encounters. He completed an internship at The Kerulos Center in 2014 studying trans-species psychology and self-determination from which he developed the material included in Kinship Workshop.
Katye Coe has been involved with Kinship Workshop since 2016 and joined as a facilitator in 2018. Katye is a dancer, performer and teacher working collaboratively in the UK and internationally. Katye is a certified Skinner Releasing Technique teacher and has completed 4 years of site and movement work in Helen Poynor’s Walk of Life Programme.
Katye grew up on a farm and later worked extensively alongside horses. Her intention in the context of Kinship Workshops relates to the importance of negotiating our place among other animals in these current times.