About Us
We are two friends, Henri and Hilary, who discovered two similar and yet quite different therapeutic arts practices - Process Painting and Embodied Drawing. We both found that these had a profound effect on our mental health and emotional wellbeing - Hilary moving through menopause with all the emotions that was bringing up, and Henri navigating a long period of grief around involuntary childlessness.
We were both drawn to getting these practices out into the world and over the last couple of years started to do exactly that. Hilary faced the challenge of marketing something that consistently escapes any satisfying verbal form of explanation, and Henri was wondering whether it was really feasible to make the career change from online marketing to process painting facilitator.
One afternoon, having been roped into helping Hilary clear brambles, Henri had a bright idea. She suggested that we team up. So we did, and here we are now on a shared mission to show you how to access your own wisdom and healing through these expressive arts practices.
Hilary Thorn
Art was my life from a very young age and I studied and worked in the art world for many years before turning towards healing and acupuncture. But I always felt there was more and when I stumbled across Focusing everything started to come together, my passion for deep listening, my love of healing and my belief in a deeper truth that is unique and yet connects us all.
Towards the end of my Focusing practitioner training I was deep in a visualisation following my felt sense (a feeling in the body that doesn’t yet have words) when a little voice popped up that said, ‘what would happen if you tried to draw it?’
And so it began, a journey into expressing the felt sense through art materials. When Henri introduced me to Sensorimotor Art Therapy I knew I’d landed somewhere very special, and I have been following that thread ever since.
For me this work has been life changing, not in a way that is easy to verbalise, but because after I do it things that felt unsurmountable or that would have lingered with me for weeks, simply lift away.
I know that you have all the answers you need inside you and that by accessing your own inner truth you also access your own healing.
Click here for more information about my acupuncture clinic.
Click here for more information about Focusing and Sensorimotor Art Therapy.
Henri Copeland
Back in 2020, I had a sudden ‘knowing’ that I would never have children and plunged heart first into a grief that was more intense than I could have anticipated.
Unable to make sense of it, I turned to art to help - I sketched ridiculous cartoon-like doodles to help me figure out what I was feeling, I used crayons to scribble frantically with eyes closed to try and release the feeling of despair, and one day I sat in the garden with my neighbour and splattered paint wildly at a canvas. It all felt great and I found it a very powerful way to cope when few around me could get their heads around my grief.
I decided to explore the expressive arts more and that eventually led me to Process Painting. I painted regularly for a few years, all the while with a little inkling telling me that I wanted to introduce this practice to others. In 2025 I got brave enough (and far enough through my grief) to start the training process to become a facilitator.
(For anyone interested in childlessness and grief, I have written several articles on substack and done a podcast interview with Julia Samuel of Therapy Works)
Our two different therapeutic art making practices stem from the same place - the knowledge that inside each and every one of us lies a deep wisdom that can guide us through our own healing.