‘Feels like home’ is an exhibition of paintings drawn from the personal photo archives of immigrants, refugees and other itinerants about leaving home and creating a new home. It is an ongoing series that explores themes of home, displacement, immigration and the effect of political policies that restrict movement.
Thomas Cartwright was born in Toronto and lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and shuttled between the two in his youth; he is, perhaps consequently, drawn to themes of displacement and resettlement. Both his ‘homes’ (Toronto Islands and Cape Town) are rich in natural beauty, and his work consistently explores the coming together of the natural world and the human-made, constructed one. He is drawn to beauty and he is drawn to meaning, and his work is an exploration of both.
Born in Wedza, Mashonaland East, Zimbabwe.
Also lived in Cape Town, South Africa.
Currently living in Makhanda, South Africa.
I moved to Cape Town in 2009 and left for Makhanda at the beginning of 2018. In my travels I am always armed with a camera, which I use to document everything that fascinates me. I mostly share these photos on my Instagram page.
I have had the privilege of learning at South African universities: namely the University of Stellenbosch, the University of Cape Town and now at Rhodes University. Whenever I hear someone speaking Ndebele or Shona, I feel proud because I know they’re my homie. I easily connect with them. The same applies to the schools of Cape Town and the streets of Makhanda where I carried out some of my research for the RIT projects.
There is a building called Salisbury House at Rhodes University. While I am not privy to its history, its name always reminds me of Salisbury, the old colonial name for Zimbabwe’s capital city, Harare. Interestingly, Zimbabwe was previously named Rhodesia after the British arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, whose name the university is also named after.
The first thing I noticed when I arrived in the then Grahamstown in 2018 was the deplorable state of the roads. The potholes remind me of the bad state of the roads in Zimbabwe, where the nation’s leadership has the audacity to rename the roads without fixing them, just as Grahamstown was renamed Makhanda towards the end of 2018.
Makhanda’s central business district is marked by High Street, which is quite wide. That street reminds me of the streets of Bulawayo, which is Zimbabwe’s second capital. In building Bulawayo, the early British settlers made wide roads to accommodate U-turns for their horse-drawn wagons. Nicknamed the City of Kings and Queens, Bulawayo was established as the nation’s industrial hub, and I lived there for two years.