Lead Artist Rachel Spring observes:

These workshops were at a drop-in centre, and I made red clay, white clay and my sculpting tools available to anyone who wished to use them. Everything that was made, I then fired in my studio.

Before handling the clay, each participant watched a multilingual powerpoint presentation exploring possible interpretations of "seeking sanctuary" and featuring photographic images of the landscapes, dwellings, communities and clay sculpture that the participants, in search of sanctuary, might have left. This presentation was designed to identify the theme, Seeking Sanctuary. But it was apparent that it brought more than this - perhaps pleasure, and a sense of recognition. Some participants said that the availability on the internet of these images and translation tools was a discovery in itself and a resource for future independent use.

The computer screen was an initial point of convergence where our eyes saw the same images and considered the same questions. It was the clay, that universal substance, which provided a means for each participant to direct and shape the rest of each unique journey.

One participant told me that her last touch of clay was of the clay that she played with outside her home as a child. She used my clay in England to make a sculpture of that home. Another repeated with vigorous fluency the coil-building techniques that had been a compulsory part of her schooling, and then departed from the familiar to create her first figurative scultpure. I could give a dozen such accounts as a dozen individuals told in clay in these workshops parts of the stories of their search for sanctuary.

Some returned every week, impatient while I was setting up at the beginning, intent while I cleared away around them at the end.

Others said they had never used clay before and then brought it to life in minutes, as if by sleight of hand, and, apparently untouched by their own creation, left others to be moved by its eloquence, gravity, beauty, import - these sandals, which the maker said represent the ones worn in his village, are such a creation ...