"Stacey Steers: Edge of Alchemy"

"Edge of Alchemy" is Stacey Steer's third film in a trilogy examining women's inner worlds. Completed in 2017, the animated film draws from Surrealist principles and techniques to create a contemporary narrative driven by female characters. Utilizing eight handmade works on paper for each second of film, Steers constructed more than 10,000 collages over five years to create her intricate 19-minute composition. Steers incorporates fragments of nineteenth century engravings and illustrations, as well as images from silent films, cutting and pasting, and adding hand-colored accents to create individual collages that she shoots with a 33mm camera and then scans in 4K. Adopting clips of popular silent-film actors Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor to construct the leading performances in her experimental narrative, Steers places two women as the primary drivers of action and plot in this reimagining of the Frankenstein story.