RETROSPECT

Thysanolaena latifolia

With the curiosity of exploring leaves, I started tracing back to my childhood memories which also are the plants that have a special meaning to me. The natural smell brought by the leaves is also impressive.

Agricultural map of China

I came from the Northeast of China, and there has a lot corn, soybeans and wheat. In my memories, my grandparents grows corn every year, and when I was very young, I tend to stand on the corn pile and seeing the yard from the top. Now even my grandparents are really old, they are still keeping the passions of interacting with the plants. My grandfather especially, really enjoy growing plants, making crafts on his own, practicing calligraphy, drawing, and writing poems.

Preface

Some testing with breaking down the materials and recreating the format

With the passion of seeing the transparency through the corn leaves, I was intentionally trying to interact the materials with lights, and see how it can transform to. Also, adding the rice dumplings leaves (a kind of bamboo leaves) is the merging of my grandparents from both sides. My mother’s mom has a really professional skill in making cooked wheaten food, and the rice dumplings she made every year engraves in my taste, no one can make a better taste than what she did. She passed away 2 years ago, and I can never taste it again.

exercise of material testing

some other material testings with different material combinations. Including paper blocks, resin+cement, cork+cement.

Jumping out of the context for a bit. I give myself a pause from the story but see when is the time I am quiet, when I feel inspired, and when I have a stable emotion. Also experiencing a bad temper and emotional control this week is giving me a hard time thinking. I feel like everyone is a skeleton wearing skin clothes, and we never know which masks they are showing. To me as well, there are so many different personalities that I show to different people, and there’re requests for me to act like a normal person, and I don’t know what is the real me. Here’s the severe problem, I don’t even know who I am. The research should sit into: under when/what circumstance I can keep real to myself.

family retrospect visualizations and personality analysis.

Based on the material relations, I give myself a map to see the relations without some distractions.

screen design with sectional patterns in CAD

Referring back to designs, I am fascinated with leaves and trying to use them as the main material of the screen design. The leaves are easily dehydrated and very fragile, I want to test with the tangible aspect first.

boiled and dried

I’ve also tried to apply glycerine on the top of the leaf but it doesn’t work. The waxing process works well.

fabric tests to give another layer of strength, but it still breaks on the strains, it was an exhausting process seeing the problem still happening, I started to tear the leaves into pieces. There’s an idea that suddenly came up to my mind, which is to weave them instead of gluing them to give the tension.

weaving leaf is an interesting process that I completely put my mind into managing the stripes and keeping myself as a medium to connect with the story behind the material.

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