A Pilgrimage for Virginia Woolf: A Final Walk

This research image depicts a moment from my reenactment of author Virginia Woolf’s final walk in East Sussex, part of my PhD research examining the creative potential of pilgrimage as performance. In this image, I am wearing a fur brown coat and carrying a walking stick that Virginia is described as wearing in accounts of her final walk. During the moment depicted in the image, I am engaged in an introspective process of mediating a dialogue between Virginia’s past walk and my present walk, exploring a sense of slippage between myself and Virginia, finding parallels between the roles of reenactor and pilgrim. The image explores a specific strand of my research, examining how the practice of reenactment could be a potential mode to examine pilgrimage as performance. A mode that offers an opportunity for us to explore how we construct our own personal histories within the structure of a pilgrimage.