One day creative workshop
September 5th 2026
Would you like to discover and explore new ways to see what you are looking at? Come and discover miniature landscapes to excite your imagination. Learn new methods, or further develop your favoured existing techniques, for recording and illustrating what delights you. Be prepared to strengthen your powers of observation, analysis and composition.
The Workshop
Multi media artist, and garden volunteer, Anne Moar, will guide you to parts of the garden where you can take time for a slower, closer look at tiny worlds made up of mosses, lichens, and fungi. Step back and view how these flourish or struggle, within their larger surroundings of text, sculptures, architecture, plants, trees, water, and the wider landscape beyond. Supported by Anne, you will have the opportunity to gather inspiration from the garden using methods of magnification and resource materials provided. You will create several photographs, and sketches (written and/or drawn), literal or abstract, before going inside to the library where you can decide on a single image or idea to expand on paper or canvas.
Key points
Suitable for beginners and artists or writers with some experience.
A variety of materials and tools will be provided, apart from photography equipment. Your phone camera will suffice. Suitable paper and mounted canvas or canvas board will be provided for your final piece.
Beginning in the garden Anne will describe how close examination and analysis of one of her finds has informed her practice. Then as you progress round the different areas you might adapt your photographs and/or make sketches to inform your understanding of the scene and form ideas for a work.
Creation of the final work will be in the quiet of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s library. Here you will have access to a variety of source and art materials.
The possibilities for using magnification and fragmentation as part of an extended art practice will be discussed and illustrated through examples of Anne’s and other artists work.
This one day workshop, held in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden at Little Sparta, is in direct support of funds to help restore and maintain this unique place. Your fee of £80 will go to support Little Sparta.
If you are interested in taking part in the workshop, please email us at contact@littlesparta.org.uk to register your interest.
Biography
Anne Moar studied Art and Art History at school before working at The Scottish Craft Centre in the 1980s. In the past decade, after working in the NHS, she has again resumed her Art studies, gaining her City & Guilds Diploma in Patchwork and Quilting in 2022; studying collographs with Hester Cox, lithography with Alistair Clark, and wood engraving with Beth Robertson. Her current development includes trialling plant material waste from the garden as a source of natural dyes and inks. Anne volunteered to help with the recovery of the garden following storm Eowyn in February 2025, and has continued volunteering at Little Sparta since then.