"This project demonstrates how artists can involve people and contribute to society by having a clear vision, being motivated, with the drive to keep going, following up all contacts, and using media appropriately. Thus leading to recognition and appreciation.

This exhibition of photographs is the tip of an extraordinary iceberg. It documents aspects of the lives of the children and their nurses.

Some of the children have died, but the overwhelming response to the call for people to get in touch, and the attendance at the exhibition, the opening and the reunion is an accolade to those children's ability to weather both the physical and psychological storms of having 'the illness you didn't mention' TB.

The exhibition includes photographs of the hospital (previously the home of Adeline Patty, the opera singer), children who were patients, nurses, visitors, and even some of the animals who lived in the grounds.

The hospital was a long way from anywhere, making visiting a major achievement for family members. The photographs reflect the pleasure brought to the children by the dedicated staff, but do not reflect the trauma of young children separated from their families, sometimes for years.

The iceberg started with the desire of one of those children, Ann Shaw, to investigate and document life for the children at Craig-y-nos.

It has up to now involved finding and interviewing people or their relatives, producing a daily blog of the interviews, directing the development of both the on-line exhibition and the first actual exhibition held at Ystradgynlais Miners Welfare and Community Hall.

The success of the project depends on involvement but the likely people could have been scattered to the winds. So the major challenge was to find people who had been in Craig-y-nos, or who had an interest.

Newspaper articles, picked up by the BBC Wales website, picked up by the Welcome Trust and Sleeping Giant Foundation, all provided publicity outlets, each with a different audience.

Contacts have come both from the local area, and from all over the world. This international dimension to the project is complemented by individual involvement and the recreation of that sense of community.

The project gained momentum, one contact leading to another, (often known as the snowball technique) with opportunities for finding other people emerging, connections being made between people who were at Craig-y-nos, talking and meeting for the first time in 50+ years, often talking for the first time of their experience and through this, beginning to work through what must have been a traumatic period of their lives.

Both the actual and on-line exhibitions show how low and high tech can be combined and used in such a way as to be totally appropriate for the style of the venue and both audiences possible physical limitations such as eyesight and likely level of technical knowledge.

Although, as the project has progressed, many people have given invaluable help through funding, interviewing, digitising photographs and organising exhibitions, the driving force behind the project has been Ann Shaw, artist/writer.

She had the original idea, the motivation and the courage to persist, despite advice to drop the project. Technical Computer assistance was provided by Malcolm Shaw.

Ann has now been invited to produce additional exhibitions and is planning a print on demand book."

Review by Karen Howard