Description
Canadian Desk Atlas transforms a copy of the once-ubiquitous school desk atlas from a flat book into a sculptural artist book. The atlas was unbound, and then the pages were spun into twisted paper threads, in which bits of the coloured maps and black lettering can still be recognized. The transformed pages are reintegrated into the book, which stands upright, passing through the spine and through holes drilled in the cover. Inside the cover there are two mats of woven threads, the rest of the threads spill out from the inside and the spine.
Statement
Karen’s transformation of a conventional school atlas—a symbol of order, precision, and authority—into a sculptural artist book questions the very premise of mapping.
The project began with scepticism about the idea of reducing the Earth’s complex, dynamic surface into flat, static pages. Looking closely we get hints of the book’s origins as a collection of maps but they have been rendered unreadable—a deliberate rejection of the traditional map’s authority. This playful reordering challenges the atlas’s Cartesian intention to fix and define the world, its spaces, places and borders. Instead, it offers a representation of movement, transformation, and impermanence. The threads emerge from the spine and spill outward, evoking the energy of natural forces. Inside the book’s covers, the two woven mats of paper threads provide a counterpoint, suggesting that even within chaos, some structure can emerge. By deconstructing and re-imagining the atlas, Trask invites us to question the systems we use to define our reality and to embrace the fluidity that underpins our experiences of the world.
Don Goodes & Karen Trask, 2024