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ART REFUGE WITH YOUNG ROOTS

Writer's picture: Art RefugeArt Refuge

Kings Cross, June 4 - July 9 2024


These images celebrate a further six week programme of workshops with Young Roots in Kings Cross which came to a close yesterday. These sessions took place in a familiar, lively and vitally important space for young people living in Home office hotels in and around the area delivered by the brilliant team at Young Roots, and where we have once again been privileged to bring The Community Table for collective and individual art making, conversation and being together in the company of one another.


During this short timeframe, the work has been backdropped by the run up to the UK General Election, the shelving and now scrapping of the Rwanda Act, with a new Labour government a few days in power…


Yesterday we brought our work to a close by inviting those at the table to make an origami crane which we all did in tandem. Originally acting as peace symbols throughout Japan, they have since been made across the world to represent a wide range of things from commemoration, love, longevity, to resilience and hope. As we each tried to form a paper bird, we paused to help one another when we inevitably got confused or stuck. Unfolding to retrace steps and refolding, most of the young people finished with a crane, the end result seeming for some inconsequential. One young person said that the cranes become like money, ‘they are made of paper but they have value.’ This young man told us that he would take away his crane and keep it in a book, to remember us.


Across the six weeks each artwork has held a moment in time and also a unique story. We very much hope to return to this setting to continue our collaboration with Young Roots in support of young people seeking safety in the UK, still on their complex journeys fraught with many unknowns, sometimes for whom hope feels too big to feel or to name, and from whom we all have so much to learn.


Words by Katie Miller & Thomas Etheridge.




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