Melbourne · Since the invasion
KOLO
коло — the Ukrainian word for circle
An art therapy circle in Melbourne for people displaced by the war in Ukraine. It runs in Ukrainian and Russian. Nobody has to explain themselves.
You do not need to have anything to say
You do not need to speak English well. You do not need to explain what happened. You do not need to be good at art, and nothing you make will be interpreted back to you.
You need only to come, and to put your hands into something.
Why creative work, and not talking
For people carrying war, words are often the wrong tool — not because talking has no value, but because of where the experience is held.
Trauma and chronic stress can register in sensation, image and bodily pattern before they ever reach language. This is why one person can describe what happened to them fluently and feel nothing, and another cannot find a single word for it. Neither is a failure of will.
Creative work offers another channel — symbolic, sensory and visual — that does not depend on finding the right sentence in a second language.
The war has not ended
This is not a finished event to be processed. New stress arrives daily — through the news, through phone calls, through visas and housing and money that are still unresolved. Therapy built around a completed past does not fit.
Language is not neutral here
Some people in the room speak Ukrainian and some speak Russian. A group built on talking can become another place where you must take a position. A group built on making does not. The clay and the colour belong equally to everyone.
Help-seeking carries a history
For many people who came here, psychological help carries an inherited weight — the memory of psychiatry used as an instrument of the state. Sitting down to make something is not the same as presenting yourself for treatment.
What war displacement actually disrupts
People often arrive expecting to be asked about one terrible thing that happened. Displacement is rarely one thing. It is the simultaneous loss of most of the systems a person uses to know who they are.
- Bodily safety
- Home and place
- Family, together in one country
- Language and fluency
- Work and professional identity
- Social role and recognition
- Community and ritual
- Economic security
- Legal certainty
- Culture in everyday life
- The future you had planned
- The ability to return
Alongside these sit griefs that are harder to name. Ambiguous loss — grieving people and places that are not gone, only unreachable. Survivor guilt — the particular shame of being safe when the people you love are not. Moral injury — having had to make choices no one should have to make. And survival numbness, the functional flatness that gets a person through the first year and then will not lift.
None of these are a disorder. They are proportionate responses to circumstances that were not proportionate. Much of what happens in KOLO is simply giving them somewhere to go.
How KOLO began
Active Kreative did not start as a business that later added a refugee program. It started the other way around.
When the invasion began in February 2022, Val was in Melbourne, pregnant, watching her homeland from ten thousand miles away with no way to help and no words for any of it. What she found was that her hands still worked when her voice did not.
The circle grew from that — first as something she needed herself, then as something other Ukrainian women in Melbourne needed too. The method came afterwards, built out of what actually worked in the room and then tested against the clinical literature, rather than imported from a textbook and applied to people.
KOLO is the origin program of Active Kreative. Everything else in the practice grew out of the circle, not the other way around.
What happens in the circle
Every session moves through the same four stages. The structure is deliberate: when the outside world is unpredictable, the room should not be.
Initiation
We begin with breath and with the body. Slow, counted breathing. Simple bilateral movement. Nothing is asked of you yet — this is where the nervous system is given a chance to notice it is safe, before anything else is attempted.
Creation
We make something. Both hands drawing at once. Clay held and pressed and shaped. Colour chosen without needing a reason. Leaves and stones arranged into a mandala on the ground.
Activation
A short witnessing. You may speak or stay silent — both are complete answers. What matters is being seen by other people without having to explain yourself to them. For many participants, this is the part that changes something.
Affirmation
We return to breath, and we close the space clearly, so that what was opened here does not follow you out into the street.
What people work with
- Breath ladders
- A counted breath structure that lowers arousal and gives back the sense of having a choice. For hypervigilance, anxiety, and nights without sleep
- Bilateral drawing
- Both hands moving at once, bridging the thinking mind and the felt body. For overwhelm, numbness, and watching your own life from outside it
- Clay and touch
- Hands in material that resists. Anger can be given a shape here when there is nowhere else to put it. For rage, grief, and shutdown
- Metaphorical cards
- Images that let an inner state be named without a sentence. For limited English, for shame, for feelings too layered to summarise
- Colour as language
- Colour chosen as communication when speech is blocked. For homesickness, ambiguity, and “I don't feel anything”
- Eco-mandalas
- Leaves, stones and soil arranged together on the ground. One object placed for home, and one for here. For belonging, and the slow work of standing on new land
The circle changes as you do
What a person needs three months after arriving is not what they need two years later. KOLO is built around that. Session content is mapped to the phase of settlement participants are actually in — a model presented at the IAETDAA Global Forum in March 2026.
0–3 months
Acute arrival
Felt safety and grounding. Nothing more is attempted.
3–9 months
Early stabilisation
Gentle expression begins, at whatever pace the person sets.
9–18 months
Identity navigation
The question of who I am in this new place, and what came with me.
18+ months
Belonging
Community integration, and connection that holds outside the room.
Ongoing
Growth and contribution
Meaning, contribution, and for some, holding the door open for the people arriving behind them.
Grounded in established migration and integration research (Berry, 1997; Bhugra, 2004; Ager & Strang, 2008; WHO, 2023) alongside clinical observation from the circle itself.
Being settled is not the same as being well.
A person can have a house, a visa and a job — and still need the first thing, which is safety in their own body.
This is why KOLO does not treat arrival dates as progress. Two maps run at once: where a person is in their resettlement, and what psychological task is actually alive for them now. They are often nowhere near each other.
Someone three years in can arrive at the circle and need grounding, not insight. Someone who arrived last month may have deep resources and need only orientation and company. Grief frequently returns at anniversaries, at family news, at a change in the war. Rigid stage-based programs miss all of this. KOLO is built to meet whichever task is present in the room today.
Six things the circle keeps returning to
Not a sequence to complete. Six recurring tasks that come back in different orders, at different depths, for years.
Safety
“Where am I now, and what helps me be here?”Regulation before anything else. Orientation to the present, in a body that has been braced for a long time.
Loss
“What has changed, or been left behind?”Grief given room — including the losses that have no funeral and no ending.
Expression
“What needs a language other than words?”Colour, line, clay, gesture. Externalising what cannot yet be spoken, at a distance the person controls.
Identity
“Who am I across the worlds I have lived in?”Holding heritage and new life together, without having to choose one and erase the other.
Belonging
“Where, and with whom, can I be connected?”Rebuilding the capacity to be around other people — and to be seen without explaining.
Creation
“What am I choosing, building, carrying forward?”Agency and future orientation. Making something is a rehearsal for authorship over your own life.
Underneath all six is one idea: displacement breaks continuity — of body, story, identity, culture, relationship, agency and future. Creative practice can help hold those threads together while everything else is being rebuilt.
See the work
KOLO — inside the circleA look at how a session runs, and what participants make.
The method, in Val's wordsWhy non-verbal creative practice reaches this community when talking does not.
From the circle
Images are shared only with the explicit consent of the people in them. Where a participant preferred not to be identified, you will see hands and materials rather than faces.
A story from the circle
A woman in her sixties arrived from Kherson. Her home had been bombed — she had seen the video, and said it did not feel real. She had left her mother behind and carried the guilt of that everywhere. She came to Australia to join her adult daughter, arrived already on antidepressants, and was full of anger and disbelief.
In her first session she said she had no feelings. She could not tell what was happening inside her. The group felt far away.
Over about eight weeks: regulation first — breath ladders, bilateral drawing, nothing asked of her. Then clay, which could hold the anger safely because clay does not flinch. Then metaphorical cards, which let her name fear without describing it. The grief came slowly, and when it came it was witnessed rather than analysed.
By the end, feeling had returned — in waves she could tolerate. The anger had softened into grief, and then into something closer to acceptance. She was sleeping. She had stopped circling the same thoughts all night. And she had started talking to the other women in the room.
The goal was never to process the story. It was to restore the capacity to feel safely, inside relationship. All details are de-identified and this is a composite description, to protect the privacy of everyone in the circle.
What participants have said
Being part of KOLO was like finding a new family. We are all going through the same struggles, and knowing you are not alone makes the burden easier to carry.KOLO participant
KOLO has been life-changing. I hope it continues so that others can experience the same growth and healing that I have.KOLO participant
For the first time in a long time, I felt peace… creating with my hands, without needing to talk or explain.Eco-Art Retreat participant
What KOLO has done
Active Kreative has worked with Ukrainians displaced by the war since the invasion, developing KOLO into the structured program it is now.
Every participant who completed a post-program evaluation reported positive change. Outcomes are gathered through structured questionnaires before and after the program, alongside facilitator observation, across four areas:
Nervous system regulation
Reduced anxiety and sleep disturbance. More capacity to breathe, pause, and choose rather than react.
Identity
Movement from “victim of displacement” toward “person in transition, with resources.”
Belonging
Feeling less alone and genuinely seen. New friendships that continue outside the sessions.
Forward movement
Self-directed regulation practices at home. Participants progressing into education, volunteering, and peer support — several now helping people who arrived after them.
Evaluation is practitioner-led — participant self-report combined with facilitator clinical observation. Change measured before and after a program without a control group indicates outcomes, not proof of cause. We describe it that way deliberately.
What holds between the sessions
A fortnight is a long time when the news arrives every morning. Since 2023 the group has kept a Telegram channel running between sessions — not a support service, and not facilitated therapy, but a place where people who know what you are carrying are awake at the same hours you are.
Several participants have gone on to hold that door open themselves, meeting newer arrivals and bringing them to their first circle. That is the part that outlasts any single term.
Join the circle
Places are limited, because the group is small and closed by design.
Прийти можна українською або російською — писати англійською не обов'язково.
You are welcome to write to us in Ukrainian or Russian. English is not required.
Current term dates, times and contribution are on the booking page.
Sessions run at Cheltenham Community Centre, 8 Chesterville Rd, Cheltenham VIC 3192.
Not ready to book?
Send us a message. There is no obligation, and you can write in whichever language is easiest.
What KOLO is, and what it is not
KOLO is a structured, trauma-aware group creative-health program, facilitated by a qualified transpersonal art therapist working under clinical supervision. It supports regulation, expression, identity and belonging.
It is not individual psychotherapy, and it is not a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Where someone needs specialist trauma treatment, medical care or crisis support, we will help them find the right referral — and people are welcome to attend KOLO alongside other treatment.
If you are in immediate distress in Australia, Lifeline is available 24 hours on 13 11 14.
Beyond the Ukrainian community
What KOLO does is specific to this community — the language, the history, the particular shape of this war. What it has produced is not.
The underlying model — regulation before narrative, non-verbal expression where language is limited or unsafe, therapeutic content mapped to the phase of settlement rather than applied uniformly — transfers to any community displaced by conflict.
Active Kreative has developed this into an eight-session program, Belonging After Displacement, designed to be delivered by trained facilitators with other displaced populations:
Arriving, and the body in a new place
Creating a container. Safety, orientation, choice and group agreements. Body and environment mapping — noticing both support and strain.
What I carry, and the journey
Cultural continuity held alongside grief. An abstract pathway map where participants choose entirely what is represented — narrative without forced disclosure.
Between worlds, and belonging
Here and there, old and new, held together rather than resolved. Then relational mapping — community, support, and boundaries.
What is becoming, and what continues
Future-self work: agency, role reconstruction, hope. Closing with a collective pattern and clear onward pathways.
If you work with a displaced community and want to talk about running this — or about training your own facilitators in the method — that is what the enquiry form below is for.
Invite Val to present on this work
Valeriya Ogorodnyk presents to organisations, clinical teams, practitioner groups, podcasts and public events on the specific art therapeutic and somatic approach used in KOLO — and on what holding a circle for people displaced by war has taught about working when words are unavailable or unsafe.
Who this is for
- Settlement, migrant and refugee services
- Community health and mental health teams
- Art therapists, counsellors and psychologists — professional development
- Universities and training providers
- Podcasts and public events in mental health
- Local government and community organisations
Topics
- Art therapy when the trauma has not ended
- When language is unsafe — running mixed-language groups
- Mapping creative therapeutic work to the phases of settlement
- Regulation before narrative: sequencing in group art therapy
- Reaching communities where help-seeking carries a political history
- Building a practice out of your own displacement