Celebrating Cultural Diversity Through Co-Creation in Rhyl Schools

In late 2023, I led an arts project in two primary schools in Rhyl, North Wales, as part of a wider initiative funded by Denbighshire Council. I worked with around 70 children aged 5 to 11, many of whom spoke English as an additional language and had recently arrived in the UK from countries including Syria and Ukraine. The children came from many different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, with 28 languages represented across the two schools.

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Over eight workshops, we created one artwork for each school. The children decided what they wanted to include, what mattered to them and how they wanted their languages, cultures and experiences to appear in the work.

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Together, we developed maps that connected different countries, languages and journeys. The children drew, made, talked and shared what they knew about the places they came from and the places they were now living in. As the work developed, the maps became a way of bringing those different places into one space.

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The workshops also opened conversations about home, language, identity and belonging. Some children talked about more than one place as home. Others used words, images and symbols from their own languages and cultures to make parts of themselves visible within the school. The final artworks are now displayed permanently in the two schools.

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This project made me think about my own experience as an emigrant now, and as an emigrant child more than 35 years ago, and about the relationship between language, place and belonging. I recognised how much knowledge the children already carried with them: different places, languages, families, journeys, and ways of living. My role wasn't to give them a story about belonging, but to create the conditions for those different stories and experiences to sit alongside one another and become part of the space they now shared.