Tom Keighley
Cardiff

What does it mean to be “at home” with a place?

Alexander Norton

I lived in these images for five years before I met them. I stood where they stood and witnessed the grey aesthetic of a city that folds around you in your developmental practice. I’ve sat in these corners of buildings, parking spaces and shop fronts and I’ve waited at the traffic lights for the green light. These details of living feel as though they are everywhere, but there is something unique about the fabrication of Wales, and especially Cardiff. It is a place that warms you in and allows you to feel content.

There is disruption on the side path, as the man waits, looks left and forward as the complicated road pattern leads to another corner. These embed the people within the environment, but above all seals them as people of home. Never have I felt, personally, a greater sense of home than in Wales, and to be “at home” raises questions of what it means to settle within a place that was founded upon history of previous inhabitants.

Every location where people settle has a connotation of home, for them at that time. This perception I present is entirely subjective but if you look around now and see the environment you have, the corner shop owner you speak to and your peripheral area, you found a sense of place in seemingly random circumstance. What it means to be “at home” is entirely subjective, but with Tom here, his work opens this question. He positioned himself, contently and proudly in the space to observe and document with effortless beauty and calm. Cardiff is not an easy place to make quiet, with its various techniques of distraction from complicated door frames, too many stickers on the window of a shop and the crooked paths people wait on, but his work captures the sense of what it feels like to exist somewhere. And he does this without pretension, ego or inflated views, he sees and records. This leads to a very unique vision and a wonderful archive of a place that can stand for every place we’ve ever settled. I always said, I left my heart in Wales and these photographs have reminded me of that.

You can find more of Tom’s work here