Sanctuary and Healing-Centred Arts Practices

By Kerry Pimblott

14 April 2025

Authors note: This article is part of a series of blogs documenting activities emerging from the multi-year project, Grassroots Struggles, Global Visions: British Black Power, 1964-1985, led by Drs Kerry Pimblott (Manchester) and Kennetta Hammond Perry (Northwestern) as part of an effort to better document, preserve and (re)present the history of Black Power and its legacies for local traditions of anti-racist resistance in the North West and East Midlands.

Window art at the Ascension Church Hulme by Lynda Sterling of OT Creative Space. Photo courtesy of Rachel Bywater Photography.

Earlier this year, we supported the Radical Reading Room Collective in co-hosting a reflective art workshop facilitated by local artist and human rights activist, Deirdre McConnell, on the theme of sanctuary.

On a drizzly night in February, a group of community members gathered in the Gallery at the Ascension Church Hulme and after some guided breathwork picked out oil pastels and began to draw. We started by connecting colours and shapes to emotions - anger, loneliness, joy - before moving on to the concept of sanctuary. Participants gathered their materials and dispersed across the Church. Forty-five minutes later we returned to the Gallery to share our creations.

Memorial and holy water stoup at Ascension Church Hulme. Photograph taken by author.

The idea for the workshop emerged during conversations with McConnell that took place almost a year ago as part of our ongoing collaboration with the Radical Reading Room Collective. This collaboration, as I have written elsewhere, seeks to surface local histories of anti-racist resistance with a special focus on the  Viraj Mendis Defence Campaign (VMDC), an anti-deportation campaign that culminated in the longest sanctuary in modern British history.

Back in the late 1980s, McConnell joined the VMDC’s Religious Support Group and quickly got involved in building ecumenical and interfaith support for the sanctuary movement, including through the hosting of national and international conferences. In April 2024, we invited McConnell back to the Ascension Church Hulme to share her recollections as part of our oral history project. She agreed and upon arrival began unloading several large paintings from her car. It was then that we learned that McConnell was also an artist and responsible for designing the sanctuary imagery that adorned much of the VMDC’s publicity as well as a plaque that constituted one of the last remaining markers of the Church’s involvement.

VMDC Sanctuary poster designed by Deirdre McConnell, c. 1987. Photo taken by author.

Like so many others, McConnell’s life was transformed by her involvement in the sanctuary movement leading her into arts therapy and human rights work in Sri Lanka.  A recent retrospective, Heterotopia: moments in art, hosted at Rogue Studios in Higher Openshaw illuminates some of these threads in McConnell’s life’s work.

A wall is dedicated to works contemporaneous to the VMDC focused on the theme of ‘Oppressive Bars’, symbolising the carceral realities of sanctuary and the border regime. Featured is an original poster advertising the first national conference on the issue of sanctuary held by the VMDC’s Religious Support Group’s at the Ascension Church in December 1987.

A separate section of the exhibition titled ‘My journey in Asia and South Africa’ showcases several of McConnell’s later works on the Sri Lankan civil war and Tamil genocide. In the collage ‘Disappearances’ (2012) and paintings such as ‘Landmine and the Mylanthanai survivors’ (1995) and ‘Mullivaikkal’ (2019), McConnell’s bears witness to the suffering experienced by those subjected to the Sri Lankan Army’s systematic abduction and massacre of Tamil people during this period. The exhibition closes on a remarkable mobile installation created by McConnell in 2024 that reflects on her involvement in human rights work in Sri Lanka over three decades.

Deirdre McConnell, Mobile/installation - looking back over 28 years (mixed media), 2024. Photo taken by the author.

Threaded throughout McConnell’s work is an engagement with theological questions of the presence of the Divine amid the disproportionate suffering caused by racialised state violence. In the collage ‘Prayer’ (1994), McConnell powerfully captures the desperate effort to maintain a sense of that presence against the swirling backdrop of a press release documenting acts of state terror.

Deirdre McConnell, Prayer (collage), 1994. Photo taken by author.

At our workshop, McConnell guided participants in the value of the arts as a therapeutic medium for exploring such experiences and forging a sense of connectedness. This contribution ties in with a growing emphasis in our project on the importance of healing-centred arts practices to sustaining movements that confront racialised state violence. The VMDC embraced the transformative power of the arts as a weapon to ‘bear witness’ and expose the realities of state racism to wider audiences. But members also recognised the power of the arts – including street theatre, banner and poster making, and liberation songs - in forging potent movement cultures that united members and enabled the envisioning of alternative futures.