For her solo exhibition, Kami no Kotoba, Paper Words, Karen Trask presented six sculptural works. All but one of the works was created during the artist’s research and creation residency at the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec studio in Tokyo. The focus of her residency was the exploration of poetry and calligraphy and their relationship with paper, as well as various techniques for manipulating paper, such as Shifu (making a paper thread out of a sheet). This exhibition is a response to that research.

Poetry is at the heart of the exhibition. Four poems by Karen Trask have been translated from French and English into Japanese by Masashi Ogura. With the help of moulding techniques, the words of the poems take physical form in paper – washi made from kozo, the main plant used to produce handmade paper in Japan. The only work that was not created in Japan is a dictionary, completely remade from spun paper.

For the works Kami no Kotoba, Paper Words I was interested in exploring where language comes from, the origin and evolution of written and spoken words and positing language is a living organism.

Karen Trask, 2025

Obsolete Concepts is a group exhibition presenting artist books as a way of looking at the future of the book as an object.

The exhibition Où vont les mots proposes a dialogue between text and paper, and the landscape. It includes three artist books, two sculptures made from dictionaries, a paper poem installed on the window of the gallery and a large-format, composite mural of a snowy landscape, ink-jet printed onto paper made especially by the artist for this image. Shifu, the Japanese technique for spinning paper into paper threads is featured in these works. The work Portes was later transformed into Inside Passage / Passage intérieur, 2010.

In 2010, parts of this exhibition travelled to Grenfell Art Gallery (formerly known as Sir Wilfrid Grenier College Art Gallery) at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Corner Brook, and were exhibited in an exhibition entitled Where the Words Go curated by Charlotte Jones.

Where do words come from? Could letters of the alphabet be seeds for planting? The image of a woman blowing on a dandelion seed has been part of the cover design of The Larousse Dictionary for many years. Since I was a child, I have sensed words and letters existing like a river or a current of air floating all around me.

In Où vont les mots / Where the Words Go, hundreds of dictionaries have been dismantled and transformed into a series of sculptures and one giant mural. Their printed papers were either torn and recycled into fresh sheets of paper or reconstituted through spinning into long paper threads. A desire to subvert the power and authority of certain types of written texts and to highlight the presence of the paper used in printing these texts were the starting points for this work.

One sentence describes the objective of much of my work: I want to touch words; I want to touch the space between words. My creative process has developed as a series of poetic investigations exploring human experience through language. A love-hate relationship to the written word was born out of loss. When I was 6 years old, my mother died in a car accident. Learning to read and to write coincided with death. This marked the beginning of a dialogue with absence, that I have been exploring, breathing, falling into and ultimately searching for words to describe. Paper, normally the invisible and ignored support material is one of the materials I use to create this presence of absence. My creative process includes researching the etymological roots of words and experimenting with early textile arts technologies such as spinning and weaving. Knowing the stories behind the evolution of words such as: text, (from textus meaning textile in Latin,) to spin, (to draw out of chaos, Latin,) stitch or suture (Sanskrit, word sutra, meaning thread and narrative scriptures) is an important part of this process.

“For over 20,000 years until the industrial revolution, the textile arts were an enormous economic force belonging primarily to women. Because of the perishability of these products, much of this contribution did not find its way into history books. Before writing became the principle means of communicating and recording information, clothing and textiles provided a place for social messages.” ( E. Wayland Barber, Women’s Work)

The spinning in this project is a reminder of this contribution – a remembering through the fingers. In Où vont les mots / Where the Words Go, I am creating space for my own sculptural writing.

Karen Trask, 2008

Lit de Proust : En attendant un baiser / Proust’s Bed: Waiting for a Kiss is an installation and performance in a backyard shed accessed by the alley. The installation includes a daybed with a handmade paper cover with quotations from, À la recherche du temps perdu in French and English integrated like a patchwork quilt. Other items included in the installation: two silkscreened images on a round piece of glass, a pillow, an artist book placed on a chair and a long banner that hangs from the window into the alleyway below. For the performance, the artist cut pages from a volume of the 1976 Petit Larousse Illustré and spun each page into a paper thread which was wound into a ball.

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Karen Trask began reading Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Inspired by the conditions that led to the creation of this work, Trask decided to reinterpretand build, in a shed, the context, the room and the bed of Proust.

Source: Dare Dare website

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Karen Trask s’est mise à la lecture d’À la recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust. En s’inspirant des conditions qui ont mené à la création de cette œuvre, Trask a décidé de réinterpréter et de construire, dans un hangar, le contexte, soit la chambre et le lit de Proust.

Source: Site web de Dare Dare

“[…] for, pinning a supplementary page in place here and there, I should construct my book, I don’t dare say, ambitiously, as if it were a cathedral, but simply as if it were a dress I was making.” Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé

“This is a project about time and memory, about words, reading and writing. It is a project about my subjective response to Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, given who I am, where I live at this moment in time. It is also a project about patience and an obsession with words.”

An exhibition such as this accentuates the isolation in which the work was originally created. Proust spent much of his adult life bedridden with severe asthma, unable to go outside. The majority of his works were written in bed, in a room insulated from the outside world with cork. Proust believed in the power of art to transform human thought.
Karen Trask presents her project in a backyard shed. The backyard is an intimate and private space in Montreal which often remains invisible and unknowable for both residents and neighbors. The shed is also an architectural characteristic of Montreal that is slowly being removed from the landscape. While discovering the multiple textures of Proust’s bed, the public will also discover an area which is an odd mixture of residences, textile factories, family furniture workshops and artist studios.

Source: Press Release, Dare-Dare, Centre de diffusion d’art multidisciplinaire de Montreal, 2006

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«[…] épinglant ici un feuillet supplémentaire, je bâtirais mon livre, je n’ose pas dire ambitieusement comme une cathédrale, mais tout simplement comme une robe.» M. Proust, Le temps retrouvé

«Voici un projet sur le temps et la mémoire, sur les mots, la lecture et l’écriture. C’est une réponse personnelle à Marcel Proust et À la recherche du temps perdu en lien avec qui je suis, où j’habite et l’époque dans laquelle je vis. Ce projet traite de la patience et de mon obsession des mots.»

Karen Trask s’est mise à la lecture d’À la recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust. En s’inspirant des conditions qui ont mené à la création de cette œuvre, Trask a décidé de réinterpréter et de construire, dans un hangar, le contexte, soit la chambre et le lit de Proust. Dans ce hangar, elle confectionne divers papiers, sur lesquels elle appose des mots, des phrases récupérés ou inspirés de l’auteur. Le public accède au lit de Proust par la ruelle qui débouche sur un jardin. Il y trouve la pièce et l’artiste qui l’accueille en plein travail, en pleine lecture ou en plein repos.

Ce projet veut accentuer l’isolement dans lequel l’œuvre de Proust a été créée, alors qu’il était alité pour cause de maladie. Également, le projet fait découvrir le hangar, espèce en voie de disparition, et la cour arrière montréalaise, cet espace intime et privé propre à la ville en le replaçant dans un quartier à zonage mixte, où se côtoient maison unifamilale et édifice industriel, usine et ateliers d’artistes.

«Créer pour moi est né d’un besoin de comprendre et d’approfondir mes expériences personnelles et oniriques. Ces références sont souvent les points de départ dans la réalisation de mes œuvres. L’écriture est un outil important qui me permet de me réinventer de façon à renouveler et à transformer mon quotidien d’artiste et d’individu. Cette écriture est présente autant à l’intérieur de mon processus de création que dans l’œuvre finale.»

Source : communique de presse, Dare-Dare, centre de diffusion d’art multidisciplinaire de Montréal, 2006