year 11 or GCSE

FRAGMENTS

What comes to mind?

broken? mirror? death?

for me, it was Snow White.

Snow White is a very well known story, found all around the world, originating in Germany. but do we know the full story? Or just fragments?

This page focuses on the raven symbol and its links to dark magic. It also includes some of my own pictures and a highly detailed drawing laced with symbolism and speculation. It depicts Snow White sitting in a forest, watched by the evil queen. But looking at the shadows on the trees, is Snow White glowing? Is she even in a forest? Those are not trees, they are telegraph poles, smudged in the thick smog. Is the queen even evil!? She doesn't appear to be scowling, or trying to kill our heroin, shes just watching... 

These are some copies of  Nancy Ekholm Burkert's work.

This is a research sheet, picking out the tiny details on the birds drawn by  Nancy Ekholm Burkert. It also shows my table of developed ideas and the fragmented portrait of Johnny Depp.

These are more fragmented portraits.

This is the page for my final piece.

This is my final piece. So much can be said about this piece, the initial shock of the immense tsunami of detail rushing at you is hard to put into words. I am passionate about creating art that makes the audience work, trying to find all the tiny sections of broken story, understanding each and every fragment. The idea behind my work is not simple; I chose the topic fragments and thought I could do fragments, not of an image, but of a story or of life itself. I chose the story of snow white, because there is so much detail and variation in the story and it is quickly becoming more popular. I wanted to stay away from Disney’s watered down and romanticised recreation of the story, it is just too recognisable and fake, I researched the story’s history and where it originated from, checking its historical accuracy and how people would have dressed back then. I explored the more gory side of the story, and how it was built around the expectations of women in the time period. I thought about turning the tables, portraying the queen as innocent and good whilst snow white is secretly evil or supernatural so as to fool everyone she meets. I experimented with the concept of the magic mirror, the way it behaves, the way it works, the fact that it is all knowing and all seeing made me think… I decided that my final piece would be the mirror, exploding out to the viewer in a beautiful eruption of shards of broken glass. The mirror was telling the story, but something in the story has changed… something went wrong, and that changed the whole course of the story and maybe even challenged the mirror’s very existence.  And it cannot deal with this, its whole purpose has been re-written and it has died as a result in a huge explosion of shattered story. And inside the mirror, on a background of dark gold, is the mirror’s dying heart. Black and diseased. Supported by its many arteries and veins and cobwebs of sticky black mucus. Leaking black blood which drips down the mirror, through its cracks into the ever darkness that surrounds it…