Despacito Art School with Sara Trillo

20 + 21 October 2025
10am – 3pm
Open School East

OSE Alumni Artist Sara Trillo worked with Despacito this Autumn to make clay and chalk sculptures, natural dyes and plant autumn seeds. Sara’s workshops re-grounded our thinking in the material and subterranean environments that surround us at Hawley Square. 

During workshops, Despacito foraged acorns at Hawley Square Garden to hand make oak gall ink – a historic, low-impact alternative to industrially manufactured artistic pigments and materials. Despacito also explored planting in chalk substrates, echoing the material make-up of Margate’s subterranean world, and used clay to create a collective sculpture of the surface of Hawley Square’s oldest oak tree. 

Workshops were supported by Community Support Facilitator Vlasta Hozova.

Sara Trillo is a visual artist based in East Kent, with a studio in Margate. She was born in Ramsgate and has spent much of her life in Kent, developing a large archive of research about the history and mythologies of her native county. She studied Fine Art at Norwich University of the Arts and in 2017 became an Associate of Open School East in Margate. She has exhibited widely in the UK and northern Europe, as well as undertaking funded residencies in diverse locations including France, Germany, Cyprus and Turkey.

Sara explores landscapes through research, walking, and making, seeking to uncover hidden histories of the human presence within our shared ecological environment. Much of her recent work has been focussed on the Kent Downs landscape, with a particular interest in dene holes – deep shafts dug into chalk, of uncertain age and purpose.

This workshop is part of Open School East’s 2024-26 thematic cycle Home is where the garden is –  find out more here: openschooleast.org/home-is