Statement

The Waves: Following the curve of the Sentence  is one of a series of works imagining the world and words of Virginia Woolf’s best loved work, The Waves. All the pages of six different English and French editions of The Waves were spun into six continuous paper ropes. The ropes were placed together along the seashore and left to let the incoming tide tumble them together.

Six were chosen to represent the six soliloquies of intermingling voices of the characters in the book. Woolf called The Waves her “play-poem”. What would Virginia Woolf do today with a camera and a desire to play with text, the human body, the tide, the ocean and the land? This thought guided the making of the work during a two-year residency at the Université de Moncton, Moncton and Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick. Students, friends, the ocean and the land were active participants.

Karen Trask, 2019