Description

Breathing Room is a concrete poetry installation in two verses written by the artist. Both verses are of handmade paper. Using a special technique for the wall text, the letters were removed or prevented from forming on the mold during the paper making process. In this way, it is the negative space or the absent space in the page that becomes the letter. The verse on the floor is made of cast paper-pulp letters elevated using metal pins. In this way the viewer enters the text, as if walking into a book.

This work was presented first in a French version in the exhibition L’une fait lire l’autre at Galerie Clark in Montréal, 1997. The poem also appears in French in the artist book Intersections – Conjonctions.

Transcript of the text:

First verse (wall)

There are no corners in this place: the walls, white and rounded stretch out like arms to hold me. This emptiness is the balm I crave. Slowly, I begin to write the words. There is only the smooth white paper and the forgiving empty space of this once forbidden body. It awaits the touch of words, the sliding of fingers over paper, the release of one body into another.

Second verse (floor)

They are milk‑white words, too long hidden between the lines. Too long exiled, they are hesitant: ghostly shadows unspoken, a pale angel quivering. A mother text begins in silence, in no‑words. Empty space advances around the letters. What was background becomes foreground, what was shadow is also light. There, a new text writes over the old.

– Karen Trask