Frankensteining Frankenstein
At the When Words Collide festival in 2021, held virtually, I had the delight of presenting encore performances of two workshops, one on The Book as Object, Sculpture, & Performance and the other on Altered Books: When Your Finished Book Becomes Another Artist’s Raw Materials. Towards the end of the latter session, I mentioned that the next project I was pondering was something to do with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, riffing off the central theme of the story to assemble a copy of the book made up of parts of different editions.
My small but mighty audience was intrigued, and we decided to plan a workshop around that idea at WWC 2022, which we optimistically assumed would be in person again.
It was not.
The organizers of WWC announced in January that the festival would once again be virtual. But as August 2022 approached, our little informal altered book group decided maybe we would gather in Calgary, Alberta, in the usual convention hotel, and run the workshop anyways. Rogue Mini In-Person WWC! In the end, I was joined by Sydney, Erin, Kevin, Michaela, and Marnie for a weekend of book destruction and reconstruction.
And so each of us arrived at the hotel with our own copy of Frankenstein — plus some extras that we quickly started referring to as “donor bodies” — and a box of semi-random art supplies to play mad scientist / book artist.
Content Warning: The story and photos that follow include descriptions and depictions of books being cut apart and put back together.
We started Saturday morning, and quickly realized this was not going to be a simple hour-long workshop project.
Among the surprises… which, really, shouldn’t have been a surprise at all… was the realization that we had, between the six of us, at least three different editions of the Frankenstein text… the 1918, the 1931, and some third one that we never did fully identify. As we started ripping and cutting out pages en masse, the conversation around the table became what Kevin described as being ‘a strange version of trading Pokemon cards’:
“Hey, I have a complete Volume 2 Chapter 6… the one that starts with ‘Some time elapsed before I learned the history of my friends…’… anyone have one to trade?”
“That’s Chapter 14 in my copy!”
“I’ll take it!”
“I would give you my Chapter 6 Volume 1 but Chapter 7 starts on the back of the last page.”
“I’ll take whatever you can give me, but you keep the last page. Where’s the donor book? I need where it starts with ‘She is innocent, my Elizabeth’…”
The other surprise was just how draining this project turned out to be. Maybe it was just the peopleing after two long years of Pandemic introversion. For some for whom this was their first experience “desecrating” a printed volume, it was perhaps a bit of an emotional drain. And making art can never be done properly without some effort. We ended up gathered around our two tables for most of the day.
But with breaks in the pool, afternoon naps, and a not insignificant amount of beverages, we all got mostly sort of something together, though none fully completed…
Micheala left with a complete set of “parts,” with plans to trim and bind them once she got them home.
Sydney’s edition features the original scar illustration cut out and resewn with actual needle and thread.
Kevin’s edition awaits the addition of a giant bolt to act as its binding method, and includes this awesome scroll of letters...
My own Frankensteined Frankenstein ended up being perhaps the nearest a completed entity, breathed into slightly more life only by virtue of my having been thinking about the project longer than the rest of the crew. But even so, it is far from being a finished work. Although that’s one unique feature of this particular project concept… how would you even know it’s not done?
The plan now is for us to continue working on our own Frankensteins, then gather again for a follow up workshop at WWC 2023, where we can talk about the experience and share our completed ‘monster’ books. I can’t wait to get the lab together again.
In the meantime, maybe you want to try Frankensteining your own?
Happy Stapling!
– Winston
