Accident Book is a sculpture made with echoes of all the mishaps that have occurred in one person’s life.
Accident Book catalogues the moments when a body lets you down in some way – falling off bicycles, power-tool slips, car crashes or DIY mishaps. Each short description of an accident is paired with an anatomical drawing of the guilty body-part that caused each accident – the sketches being drawn from life in the UCL Anatomy Department.
500 Accident Books were printed and then deliberately left in the waiting rooms of ‘Accident and Emergency’ wards in 7 hospitals across London. The waiting patients discovered the publications amongst the piles of Hello! and Readers Digest magazines. On the first page of the book the readers were encouraged to take the hard-back volume away with them but also to register their unique book online and enter the reason for their own visit to A&E. The books slowly made their way out into the world with the former patients – whose own stories are now also recorded on the website.
The Accident Book project grew to become a small inventory of stories of pain, slapstick and mistakes.
The stories of accidents in the book can be read here:
https://www.simonfaithfull.org/works/accident-book/
The patients’ stories can be seen here: https://www.simonfaithfull.org/accidentbook/register/.