There Is No Place Like Home : Illustrating Heritage, Race and Class Through the Personal Story of International Adoption

The artistic research project There Is No Place Like Home consists of a text guide and a graphic novel. The part called the Companion, is a guide that aims to show how the graphic novel was designed as a research project and that formulates the background, theory, method, intention, design and sources of the work. It is a part that actively reflects on position, readability, communication, transparency and accessibility. The graphic novel is the research materialised through artistic practice, which is responsible for being in dialogue with the questions I have asked through artistic production. It focuses on style, storytelling, craft and visual narratives through a critical account of adoption, race, class and betweenship. It explores intersectional illustration methods and allows the image to take the primary role in the narrative. The illustrations in this work challenge norms, expectations, and systems by embracing a dynamic, layered narrative. These stories reference image hierarchies, status, and taste, and aim to operate outside the aesthetic value systems of modernism, emphasising craftsmanship, time-consuming detail, colour, and ornaments as core visual values. The graphic novel and its Companion have worked together to present this artistic research project in an accessible way to an audience beyond the academic world by reflecting on and adapting language, sources and references. Through storytelling and the combination of text and images, the work tells the story of a personal journey while embodying political agency, calling for change and doing things differently by using a more commercial format that is educational, inviting and accessible.