Aunt Maud’s Scrapbook

Edited by Christoph Keller and Kathy Slade.

Co-published by ECI Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and JRP|Ringier.

Aunt Maud is a tertiary character from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 novel, Pale Fire. Little is known about Aunt Maud, she is described as a mediocre painter and scrapbook artist. Sydney Hermant creates a new life for this fictitious character by making Aunt Maud’s Scrapbook in the form of an artist book. The development of the scrapbook is guided by events within the novel’s narrative, historical events that occurred during Nabakov’s writing of the novel, and events culled from Nabokov’s biography. Hermant takes us on a fractured reimagining of the life of Aunt Maud that winds through the Luddite Rebellion, oil crises in the Middle East, and a full-on Merman formal ball.

Sydney Hermant is a Vancouver based artist, writer and curator. Since graduating from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2000 her work has been included in exhibitions across Canada and in Tokyo. She has a BA in literature from Dalhousie University (1993) and studied at the Ecole Nationale Superiéure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1999). She was the Director/Curator of the Or Gallery from 2002 to 2005.