Summer Project: The Pickwick Blogs

Our summer project brief was to design a character, within the brief we were told to use the contextual evidence of 'The Pickwick Papers' by Charles Dickens but it was merely a starting point. The brief was incredibly open- "can be real or imaginary, human or non human" basically It could be ANYTHING and that was slightly oVERWHELMING for a first project.
Staying true to Norwich, I decided to focus the character on a homeless woman who inhabits certain areas of the city centre, pottering about- her key role, reading magazines for hours on end in whsmiths.
My initial research:

From these initial sketches I formed some varying experiments through photography which lead me to my final set of images which I took to my second day of university and first ever (non formal) crit!

observation of different ground patterns:

final images:

Eleanor Clarke, the story of a woman who spent all of her money trying to become published so in turn pushes herself into poverty to fulfil her dream. She carries her personal belongings around in carrier bags, appreciating the small things in life whilst also collecting spare change which will allow her to post her letters that week. Her eyesight is poor but with her thick rimmed, well magnified glasses she can see things infront of her very closely. She watches Jeremy Kyle through shop windows and is disgusted by the kind of people who can capture an audience with a story as she believes her stories are much better. She looks at 'real life' and daily stories magazines about celebrity gossip and made up ""real life"" stories but she doesn't care about those things- she is looking for her name to come up in submitted stories column but it never does. She never makes eye contact with anyone, more like she slumps and scrapes her feet on the floor heavy with her own disappointment. The last two images are of her posting her letter for a possible competition and the other is her route map around Norwich. When I was constructing this investigation I found out that different WHSmiths has different stock so there was a possibility that she got moved or that a magazine she posted her work to was no longer stocked at the first whsmiths.

During the crit day we had to get into groups of 8 and show our work and each member of the group got to choose their favourite to present to the class and mine got chosen!!! My tutors were very nice and complimentary about it saying that they liked the character + the perspective.