Art, Refuge and Belonging: City of Sanctuary at Wrecsam Ffair

As we continue looking back at Wrecsam Ffair, we’re taking the opportunity to give some of the individual contributions to the three-day event the attention they deserve.

One particularly powerful contribution came from City of Sanctuary, who brought a creative trail featuring artwork created by local school children as part of a competition organised to mark Refugee Week 2026.

With 21 images from the display, there is plenty to explore.

But the ideas behind the artwork are perhaps even more important than the artwork itself.

Exploring the refugee experience through art

The creative trail invited children to explore the refugee experience through drawing and observation.

Using brave poses and sketches of mannequins, the children were encouraged to think about both the vulnerability and strength that can be inherent in the refugee experience.

The decision to use a bare figure had a particular meaning.

It represented the idea that refugees may have to leave everything behind.

Home.

Familiar surroundings.

Possessions.

Community.

The things that normally give us a sense of security and belonging.

Rather than trying to explain those experiences through statistics or complicated language, the artwork offered another way of thinking about them.

The meaning in the colours

Colour was also an important part of the work.

The children used different colours to represent different aspects of the refugee experience.

Blue conveyed the sadness and challenges faced.

Rainbows and bright colours symbolised hope.

And green represented new beginnings.

The result is artwork that doesn’t present the refugee experience as one-dimensional.

There can be loss and hope.

There can be vulnerability and strength.

There can be difficult beginnings alongside the possibility of something better.

The gallery

We’ve included 21 photographs from the City of Sanctuary display below.

[INSERT 21-IMAGE GALLERY HERE]

Taken individually, each piece offers something different.

Taken together, they create a much broader picture of how young people have interpreted the experiences of people who may have had to leave everything behind.

A different way of understanding

One of the reasons we were particularly pleased to see this work at Wrecsam Ffair is that it provides a different way of approaching a subject that can sometimes become reduced to numbers, headlines or arguments.

Art doesn’t require us to have all the answers.

It can simply ask us to stop for a moment and look.

To imagine.

To think about what it might mean to lose the things that make somewhere feel like home.

And to consider what hope and a new beginning might look like.

That feels closely connected to the thinking behind TCC’s Belonging in Our Community campaign.

Belonging starts with understanding

The Belonging in Our Community campaign is about challenging the idea that communities are divided into simple categories of “us” and “them”.

That doesn’t mean pretending that our experiences are all identical.

They aren’t.

A refugee’s experience of leaving home can be profoundly different from that of someone who has never had to contemplate doing so.

But understanding doesn’t require us to have lived the same experience.

It requires us to be willing to listen, learn and imagine life from another person’s perspective.

These young people’s artwork offers exactly that opportunity.

Through a bare figure, they explored what it might mean to leave everything behind.

Through blue, they explored sadness and difficulty.

Through bright colours and rainbows, they found hope.

And through green, they represented the possibility of a new beginning.

Young voices matter

There’s another reason this display deserves attention.

These aren’t professional artists producing an exhibition about a distant issue.

They’re local school children, using creativity to explore an important human experience.

Giving young people the opportunity to think about difficult subjects, express their ideas creatively and have those ideas seen by others is itself part of building a stronger community.

And that’s something we saw repeatedly throughout Wrecsam Ffair.

People weren’t simply being asked to watch.

They were being given opportunities to create, participate, question, listen and share.

The City of Sanctuary exhibition was one part of that much bigger picture.

Thank you to City of Sanctuary

We’re grateful to City of Sanctuary for bringing the exhibition to Wrecsam Ffair and, particularly, for creating a space where the work of local school children could be seen by the wider community.

Most of all, we hope these photographs encourage people to spend a little time looking at the artwork itself.

Because sometimes a picture can make us think about something in a way that a hundred words can’t.

Vulnerability.
Strength.
Loss.
Hope.
New beginnings.

And, ultimately, belonging.

We have more in common than we think.