The Hey! Earthlings! Exhibition opened on Monday 16th July in Oswestry Library, to coincide with Refugee Week. Do come and find it! It will stay in Oswestry Library until Wednesday 25th July, and then transfer to the Gateway Centre in Shrewsbury.

Before you, you’ll find an exploratory, eccentric cupboard created from recycled furniture. You are invited to open the Cabinet’s doors and investigate!

Inside the many small doors and drawers you will find photographs and artworks, short films on screen, poems, stories, objects, and audio recordings that you can listen to on headphones.

The contents of the Cabinet have been created by Hey! Earthlings! participants from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds in response to our Shropshire heritage and landscape. These people are from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Iran and Turkey. They worked alongside artists Andrew Howe, Jill Impey and Jamila Walker, a poet (me), and community co-ordinators Anna Martin and Marina Churm.

For this exhibition, people who have moved across borders, and those offering welcome, have worked together to share stories, objects, and perspectives on their own terms. 

Rather than turning lives into curiosities, this Cabinet asks us to be curious with empathy — and to reflect on how we might tell richer, more respectful stories in the future.

Here’s some photos taken at the end of the day we spent curating the exhibition.