‘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.
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.