Art of Recovery explores the potential of a participatory arts engagement with place to contribute toward the recovery and reconnection of refugees who experience trauma. The study responded to the international challenge of refugees’ mental health as a global priority as they experience higher prevalence rates of severe mental health disorders in comparison with the general population. The role of participatory arts in contributing toward recovery and reconnection is growing, but policymakers and health professionals are constrained by the lack of research exploring its benefits. We worked with 14 participants in four participatory arts workshops exploring the benefits of artwork focusing on remembered or imagined healing places. A qualitative thematic analysis of the artwork drew on Herman’s theory of recovery identifying “remembrance”, “mourning”, and “reconnection” to assess the elements of potential recovery, including aspects of the participants’ experience of transition between their homeland and the United Kingdom (UK), and new social connections. In conclusion, the study suggests that participating in a group making artworks of places associated with safety may contribute to processes of transition and social connectedness, prompting in turn feelings of wellbeing. The study offers insights into arts and health issues of interest to refugee-supporting communities, health professionals and policymakers.

This article reflects on a funded participatory artmaking project that engaged displaced people whose traumatic experiences prior to exile in the UK necessitated referral for psychological support. Reflections are informed by action research method involving a cyclical reflexive feedback loop, augmented by intra-action and deterritorialisation. Within this context, the Deleuzoguattarian framework is used to add insights into artmaking as a deterritorialising vector of destabilization to identify beneficial shifts in participants’ narratives of self in transition between the original homeland and the new environment. Artworks understood through the clients’ voices over the course of ten weeks, suggest transition from a repetition of original trauma to artworks focused on present lives, and more positive agency. The article explores how witnessing and being witnessed, in the context of emerging intra-actions and transitions, integrate the authors within those processes, authors and clients becoming part of each other’s new self-narratives.