Commute is the second of three prints accepted into Mini Print Cymru | Wales, showing at Mission Gallery, Swansea (November 2025–January 2026) and Royal Cambrian Academy, Conwy (March–April 2026). Working within the same intimate 100mm x 100mm format, this piece explores the journey between home and work.

Together, these three prints (Home, Commute and Work) tell a story of working life during the Industrial Revolution, holding up a mirror to our everyday lives now and revealing how the fundamental rhythms of life haven’t really changed.

The Journey

This particular piece focuses on movement and transition. The daily passage from home to work, work to home. In industrial Wales, this journey often meant walking miles along muddy roads, crossing landscapes thick with smoke and iron, catching first light over valleys dotted with chimneys.

Research into 19th-century working patterns revealed how the commute was often an ordeal in itself. Workers might walk for hours in darkness, arriving at factories or mines already exhausted. Yet this journey also provided time for reflection, community, and mental preparation for the day ahead.

Today the journey looks different but feels the same. Trains, buses, cars, or sometimes just rolling out of bed to the desk. From coal mines to data mines, the fundamental experience remains: that daily crossing between our private and working selves.

Despite technological changes, the commute remains a defining feature of working life. Whether crossing industrial landscapes or scrolling through messages on a morning train, we’re all part of this great human movement between the spaces of our lives.

Commute acknowledges that while the modes of transport have evolved dramatically, the human experience of transitioning between home and workplace connects us across generations. We are still travelers, still crossers of thresholds.

The Print

The 100mm x 100mm format demanded focus. I concentrated on capturing that sense of movement, the in-between moment that frames our days. The composition explores how this transition serves as both boundary and bridge, marking the shift from one state of being to another.

The prints in this series work individually, capturing moments of departure, arrival, or transition. Viewed together in sequence, they form a continuous narrative about how we structure our days around work.

Commute is part of Mini Print Cymru | Wales, touring Mission Gallery, Swansea and Royal Cambrian Academy, Conwy through 2026.