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 singer/songwriter. Her work has been included in exhibitions across Canada and in Tokyo. Hermant is a founding member of the band Hello Blue Roses and the artist collective Project Rainbow. She has a BA in literature from Dalhousie University (1993) studied at the Ecole Nationale Superiéure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1999), a BA From Emily Carr (2000),and an MA in visual art from the University of British Columbia (2011). She was the Director/Curator of the Or Gallery from 2002 to 2005.

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