My Home, My Hometown began with falling leaves and the question of what happens when a seasonal trace becomes geological matter. Coal is both a material and a record of a long transformation: plant life, pressure, fuel, work and home.
Final work
The project culminated in five paintings made with coal, ink and clay on canvas. Rather than illustrating classical Chinese poetry, the paintings let landscape, chemical reaction and literary memory operate together as material images.
Process
Material tests moved between coal, clay, charcoal, iron oxide, ferric sulphate and red earth. Rubbings, studies and small drawings established how the material could be layered, fixed, allowed to bleed or left unstable.
Research
Research connected Jiangxi, hometown memory, plant matter and classical poetry. The Blending Portrait experiments were kept as process material: they test how a cultural figure and a family image can occupy the same drawing without becoming a finished work in their own right.