MEANING MAKING ACROSS PLACE & TIME

Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, Suffolk

Autumn 2025

This Autumn, our Essex team twice accompanied a small group of men from Wethersfield Asylum Centre in Essex to @gainsboroughshouse in next door Suffolk, once the childhood home of artist Thomas Gainsborough. With our Arts For Impact Big Give funds, Art Refuge had the privilege of collaborating again with the museum’s Learning Team, along with their Arts Council funding. This was an important project for us, particularly given the anti-migrant protests & daily racism many of the men experience having crossed the threshold of the large rural camp into nearby towns.

Inside the 16th century house, the rich warm smell & floorboards, worn with time, reminded one young man from Eritrea of his grandmother’s house, his gentle words overheard by an invigilator of his grandmother’s age. The visit also included a guided gallery tour of Gainsborough’s oil paintings dramatically spotlit & hung against sumptuous green silk wallpaper. Another man from Afghanistan scrutinised one of the images before stating “my painting is like this!”, holding up an image of a landscape painting on his phone to show the group.

On both afternoons, we gathered @gh_printworkshop for a hands-on workshop led by artist-in-residence, renowned British printmaker @katherinejones_pp. With quiet concentration, the group created collagraph prints, layering simple materials to build texture & tone. Katherine reflected on the way each individual listened and processed this new & relatively complex technique, producing beautiful prints in unique, interesting ways.

Over lunch, the artist in the group shared quietly with the Sudanese & Eritrean men present: “I had to leave my country because they would kill me for the art that I make.” He then immersed himself in a print series, speaking about the joy it gave him in this setting. In the next workshop he spoke with eloquence about how his print was about family loss, the technique lending itself to rich process & meaning-making.

The print studio’s @katherine_frin_arnold spoke of “the essential value of arts & culture in our everyday lives, an enrichment which should be accessible to all members of our community.”