Thy Creature

description

This project responds to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein. The creature at the heart of this story is an object of both fascination and revulsion. Like all monsters, he exists outside of normative standards and in doing so represents our most fearful selves.

The drawings are based on Boris Karloff’s performance of the monster, within James Whales’ Frankenstein films from the 1930s. Karloff's iconic representation has come to stand for the very idea of a monster.

The faces are drawn with brush and ink on rice paper, then torn out and glued individually onto the gallery walls within this installation. Through the process of repetition and accumulation, as well as the vagaries of the process and materials used, the drawn images of the monster’s face shift and transform. These transformations, from one image to the next, suggest the creature’s lived experience, as well as the externalization of the psychic projections we bring to his story.

Frankenstein’s monster is fascinating not because he is so alien, but because he embodies our fears and anxieties about our own mortality, alienation and difference––he represents our own most monstrous selves.