Statement

The knotted and woven textile drawings of Temps retrouvé echo the way Proust wrote his book. My intention with this project was to create a kind of architecture of Proust’s writing. This work was created while on a residency at l’Université de Moncton, Moncton, NB.

When I began this project, I had no clear idea of what the work would look like. Neither sketch, nor model was made in preparation for what has turned out to be an epic adventure. Perhaps epic is a slight exaggeration of terms when compared to the actual writing of the book. It took Proust the better part of his adult life to complete and he died before it was published or even edited and he was famous for his add-on edits.

With only two colours at my disposition: the white-cream margins of the paper and the greyish text-body, I separated the text from the margin and cut each onto long single strips. Using the Japanese technique shifu, refined during my residency in Tokyo in 2014, I spun the strips of paper into threads.

I decided to let my response to reading Proust and his process influence my own process. For the first volume of the triptych, I started by making a series of small, square and circular weavings, imagining the many characters of the novel as a series of constellations or stars. Slowly, I linked these “characters” together to create one large work. In the second volume, using the white, margin threads only, I began by making the outline of a geometric shape, inspired by the window of the church in Illray, – the village of Proust’s childhood. I then proceeded to make a series of scribble –like lines to crisscross the window structure, effectively blurring the original structure. For the third volume, I was inspired by his writing process, visible in the manuscripts, with his’paperoles’ as he termed them – the multiple add-ons tacked onto the margins and between the lines . Keeping the page margins intact and unspun, I used them to create a building-like structure, weaving the spun text threads in and out of the structure. Constantly working to create a fragile balance between a sense of chaos and order was my principle guideline.

Karen Trask, 2024