And The Door Opened: Drop in Demonstration and Workshop, November 30th and December 7th 2019

The drop in on November 30th brought people in from the shopping mall and library to see me demonstrating how to rebuild a shattered pot. Some people came, having attended the launch, others saw posters, others followed social media posts but most just came in from the mall.

The workshop, where I invited people to bring a broken pot from home and show them how to mend it was all people returning from one of the earlier events. There are no images of the mending workshop, mainly because everyone was too busy concentrating on their work and because I forgot to take any but also because there was a kind of intimacy about the day. People brought their own things with their own stories. I can share one of these though. A woman brought a broken ceramic clown - just the button was broken, a tiny part of it but it was in numerous pieces. She was Nigerian and her father had been a leading trade union activist there. In the 1960s he went to Russia as part of a TU delegation and was given the clown as the TU equivalent of a diplomatic gift. She mended the button with utmost care. At the end she said, 'I'm going to leave out this last piece as a memorial and to honour all the shattered lives.'

Women @the Well, (W@W,) is a women-only service located in Kings Cross dedicated to supporting women whose lives are affected, or at risk of being affected by prostitution, and helps them to find ways out.

‘And The Door Opened,’ is a series of events with displays of Claudia’s pots, with talks and demonstrations that illustrate the lives of the women supported by W@W.

The aim is to enhance the public’s understanding of what prostitution is, to name the abuse and exploitation, and to show that, with the right support, girls and women do not need to live and die exploited in the sex trade – there are ways out.