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Look, Learn, Make: Papier-mâché Picasso with Katrina Cowling
Thursday 5th November 2026 , 6:00pm to 9:00pm
Develop your creative skills in this two-part workshop run by artist Katrina Cowling. Paint and create your own papier-mâché or sculptual object, experiment with mark-making, colour, and gesture techniques, and take home your creations!
This is a creative, two-part workshop taking place on:
Thursday 5th November, 6 – 9pm
Thursday 12th November, 6 – 9pm
*Please note, you are unable to purchase tickets for just one workshop.
Discover the joyful world of artist-made vessels in this two-part creative workshop led by Katrina Cowling. As the first event in our Look, Learn, Make series, Papier-mâché Picasso combines art history, discussion and hands-on making, inviting participants to learn from artists of the past and present while creating their own unique artwork.
Taking inspiration from the ceramic works of Pablo Picasso, you’ll explore how vessels can become expressive artworks rather than simply functional objects. Picasso was a prolific maker of plates, jugs, vases and sculptural ceramics, experimenting with painted surfaces, engraved textures and playful forms. His work is full of colour, character and imagination, often featuring animals, mythological figures and expressive faces.
As part of the workshop, you will place Picasso’s work within a wider artistic and cultural context. Together you will consider the influences that shaped his practice, the complex legacies of modernism, and the ethical questions that continue to surround some of art history’s most celebrated figures. Rather than viewing Picasso in isolation, we’ll reflect on how artists borrow and take from, respond to and influence one another across different times and cultures.
Whilst making your piece over two sessions, you will learn about the history of modern and contemporary vessel-making through the work of artists including Grayson Perry, Lindsey Mendick and Donald Locke, considering how artists use ceramics and everyday objects to tell stories, explore identity and challenge traditional distinctions between craft and fine art.
You will develop your own papier-mâché creation, choosing from forms such as a vase, plate, jug, plant pot, coaster or sculptural object. Through experimentation with painted mark-making, colour and gesture, you will transform your piece into a personal artwork inspired by a rich and diverse history of artist-made vessels.
Suitable for beginners and those with creative experience, this relaxed workshop offers an opportunity to look closely, learn critically and make creatively. By the end of the course, you’ll leave with a beautifully painted vessel or object to display at home.
This workshop will take place at Unit F13, Royal Albert Wharf, London E16 2GU; What3Words: ///curiosity.beside.melt
More about Katrina Cowling
Katrina Cowling (b. 1990, Bradford, UK) is a British Korean artist. She studied at the Royal Academy Schools and Falmouth University. She was appointed the Kenneth Armitage Sculpture Fellow in Leeds between 2021 – 2023. Her intuitive and playful practice moves between sculpture, installation, kinetics, stained glass, drawing and writing. She is a trained neon-bender and maker of light.
Cowling’s practice shifts between formal sculpture, bricolage, spatial intervention and neurotic machines. Her processes combine highly skilled making with the expedient and janky, questioning notions of skilled and unskilled labour, what constitutes an art object and how traditional value systems can be undermined.
Her methodology is rooted in play and her approach to making is driven by obsessiveness, neuroticism, extreme joy and extreme fear. She flits between scales, from tiny models and maquettes to architectural installations, from the overly-laboured to the lightest of gestures.
The trembling line, flight, slowness, the animal, and the archetype are motifs that recur in her work. She is concerned with sincerity, stupidity, failure and pathos in life and art and how affect can be communicated through objects. Her installations resemble sketches for an archaeology of inner landscapes; traces of restless thoughts, desires and feelings made spatial.
Instagram: @katrinacowling
Access Information
Ground floor workshop and ground floor toilet facilities, wheelchair accessible.
If you have any questions regarding accessibility at this event or would like to make us aware of any
access requirements that you have in advance of attending, please email showie@bowarts.com
Transport Information
Unit F13, Royal Albert Wharf, London E16 2GU; What3Words: ///curiosity.beside.melt
Nearest station: Gallions Reach (DLR)
Bus: 129, 262, 474, 366, SL2
Parking: No parking available
Bike: Limited lockable rings bike parking available
