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Expanded Self: The Big Deep Residency
Grounding, Mapping, and Integrating the Shadow
An 8 Session Somatic Painting Practice
Through Somatic Mark-Making and a deep, intuitive relationship with your materials, we excavate a creative channel while healing the nervous system.
Shadow Mapping | We look at The Shadow—grounding heavy energy through somatic release.
Transformative Painting | We look at The Golden Shadow—reclaiming your brilliant, playful Inner Child and painting a new narrative.
Creative Integration | We finalize the process by cementing your expanded self back into your daily art practice.
440~
Imaginative Still-Life Painting
A 6 sessions Study
The Imaginative Still Life is a study in internal architecture - to activate the intuitive and imaginative channel—the core muscle of an authentic art practIce.
We use composition through three primary stages: the gravity of the table (our root and anchor), the form of the vessel (our capacity and how we hold space), and the attitude of the flora (our forward-facing, where we meet the world).
We use composition through three primary stages: the gravity of the table, the form of the vessel, and the soul of the flora.
6 Online Sessions
One-on-one ~ Tutorials ~ Session support
280~
Residency
If you are looking to integrate this work into a broader, customized creative roadmap, you may choose to pivot your Residency focus to this study of still-life architecture.
6 Session Workshops
Somatic Mark-Making
Golden Shadow Painting
Golden Shadow Painting
Shadow Mapping
Phase I: The Excavation
240~
A deep-dive into the heavy energy stored in the body. We bring the inner critic to the surface, using the color black and somatic mark-making to ground, express, and befriend the shadow.
Golden Shadow Painting
Golden Shadow Painting
Golden Shadow Painting
Inner Child Reclamation
Phase II: The Brightening
240~
A deep-dive into the brilliant, joyful, and hidden parts of the self. Using transformative painting and a simplified portrait formula, we repaint your creative narrative and rewire the nervous system for joy.
Conversational Sessions
Creative Alignment
Creative Alignment
Creative Alignment
Head-to-Body
Connecting Vision to Action
120~
This is for the artist who has the ideas, the desire, and the drive, but feels disconnected from their purpose or bogged down by "making" it happen. We use somatic coaching to map your creative intent, locate your "Why," and bring that mental vision down into your hands and your brushwork.
Bridging the gap between your conceptual world and your applied practice.
Integral Artist
Creative Alignment
Creative Alignment
Body-to-Head
Excavating the Hidden Self
120~
This is for the artist who feels stuck, shut down, or overwhelmed by heavy energy in the body. We go inward to locate the shame, the inner critic, or the hidden talent currently held in your physical tissue. We use somatic mark-making and nervous system regulation to bring that internal truth to the surface.
Releasing stored blockages and integrating the too much into your conscious creative practice.
The Path: 30 Years of Embodiment
For thirty years, my body has been the archive of my work. I have used my acute awareness of the subtle energy body as the primary material in my performance art, large-scale installation art, and meditative painting over the years.
Parallel to this, my Buddhist practice—also spanning close to thirty years—has been the essential teaching of how to hold space in the body. It taught me how to sit with the nature of suffering and how to remain present within that internal landscape.
In my early performance art years in Atlanta, New York City, and residencies in Italy, I embodied female and shadow archetypes using an audience-forward-facing process of vulnerability and confrontation as a vehicle for embodied self-awareness.
I brought my body with me into installation art by embodying the materiality to be the object of focus in the room, allowing me to participate as an audience member—observing, having conversations, and seeing it from all sides.
As I continued to explore mediums, I found a pull to float in the middle of the ocean, buoying in that place between that deep, dark unknown below the surface that we cannot see and that beautiful sunrise or sunset. Buoying there, feeling the weight of the void, along with the glorious bright light of life itself—this led me to painting the gradients, which became a somatic healing process of merging these two worlds.
Tulum has been a way of bridging that distance even more; it is a somatic environment where the power of the land—the cenotes, the jungle, the deep water—is an inherent support for this work.
I have spent my life learning how to hold space for the shadow and the light, and I have learned that the most important work is the work we do to reclaim our own territory. This residency is the current iteration of that thirty-year practice. I’m not just teaching; I’m bringing everything I’ve learned about how to inhabit a space, how to confront the shadow, and how to use the body to find stillness.
I am Kirstin Mitchell. You can see more of my work here:
If the practice calls you deeper — if you want to bring your work into a living, breathing circle of women who are doing the same — there is a place for that.
The Big Deep Circle opens May 1st.
A weekly devotional for curious artists. We gather every Sunday.