Set in the Alpine landscape that inspired Mary Shelley’s classic novel, Chloe Dewe Mathews’ photographic series In Search of Frankenstein juxtaposes snow-capped mountains with a network of eerie underground bunkers built in the 1960s to shelter the entire Swiss population in the event of a nuclear disaster. The project was conceived during a residency at the Verbier 3-D Foundation in 2016, when the artist discovered that Shelley’s manuscript had been started during a holiday in 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva. The rainy and unsettling weather conditions of that ‘summerless’ year forced Shelley and her friends to stay cooped up indoors day after day, dreaming up ghost stories, from which the mythical Frankenstein monster emerged. Dewe Mathews photographed the region that inspired the 18-year-old author, exploring miles of underground corridors and vast melting glaciers that seemed to offer parallels between Shelley’s prophetic socio-environmental concerns and the anxieties of our own time. The artist interweaves his photographs with reproductions of the original manuscript.
17 photographs, wallpaper, display cases with postcards and editions of Frankenstein.
This exhibition is part of the Alt +1000 festival.
