An Ordinary Eden - Margaret Mitchell

Festival Exhibition

Location: 26 Station Road, Colwyn bay

Open: 4th October - 31st October 2025.

An Ordinary Eden contemplates the universal need to belong, lay roots, and be connected to people and place.

These are experiences that remain hidden from most. Experiences of precarity, of instability, of inadequate support that damages lives. In this work, individuals across Scotland offer an insight into both practical and psychosocial repercussions of transient and precarious experiences of ‘home’.

All the people photographed had different stories on housing and home. All had different paths that brought them to their present, with histories that were multi-layered, complex, and nuanced. In each person resides a story of rebuilding and redemption, of leaving a past to forge a new future. Alongside this lies the acknowledgement of the impact their experiences have left on them as they seek to create roots and belong once more.

Each individual’s idea of ‘home’ is not a wish for a future idealised scenario, an unattainable fantasy. Rather, it is the ordinary, the everyday that is sought: safety, security, stability. This work is rooted in an appeal to our basic humanity, our compassion. That the impact of being without a home – in all the ways that can happen – is understood not only in an immediate practical manner but also on an emotional level. The need to belong and have meaningful connections with others. We should all be able to do that in a society that cares, in a society that works for all. 

This is not a search for utopia, an unreachable fantasy. It is the simple wish for a regular life. A pursuit for each individual’s Ordinary Eden.

“Where do I want to go?
Somewhere slightly better than here”

Michael 

Margaret Mitchell’s An Ordinary Eden was made over four years of ongoing engagement, during which she met, interviewed, and photographed individuals across Scotland with current or past experiences of homelessness. Their stories reveal both the diversity of causes and the years spent in precarious situations because housing and support were inadequate. Yet within hardship, profound resilience was often found. For some, this also led to working with Shelter as defenders of housing rights, to help those in situations they had once endured themselves. 

www.margaretmitchell.co.uk

All festival exhibitions are FREE to visit.