(Work still in progress)
I'm putting together the work done during the one-month I spent in Fort Kochi, as a part of the Non-fiction Comics Master Practice Workshop with Orijit Sen, sponsored and supported by Kochi Biennale Foundation & Pepperhouse.
The primary task at the workshop was to go around Fort Kochi, find a single character with a story that fascinates and document it as a comic.
My heart was drawn to spend time on the fishing trawlers docked along the shorelines of Kochangadi and that's what I did. I went to different docks every day, spent time sketching, talked to people (mechanics, fishermen, trawler owners). And all that while, I was looking for a single fascinating character with a story that I could make into a comic..
(Click each image to view the text better.)
"600 alam? Does that mean 600 meters? or 600 feet?"
.. and suddenly I realised that instead of finding one story to document, I'd collected a whole lot of fascinating little stories and details!
What fascinating names!
The more time I spent at the docks, more I felt that the fishing boats / trawlers were the main characters of my stories and the people just the background.
So I went on and documented a fishing trawler (named Khajah) in all detail..
..and made Khajah as a 3D model on SketchUp!
(Be patient. The GIFs below takes some time to load.)
I continued to recreate a whole dock of trawlers in 3D.
Using these models of trawlers as a base, I'm working on my final comics to be made into a small book. This is still a work in progress. Below are snapshots from it.
Thank you. Hoping to update this page soon.