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



Exhibition History

March 6 – March 30, 2008
Galerie d’art d’Outremont, Outremont, Québec, Canada
Description

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.

Statement

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


Publications

De la part des vaincus
Virginie Jourdan, Florence S. Larose & Libby Shea (2014). Galerie RDV, Nantes, France, 2014, p.10-11.

De la part des vaincus is the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name, presented in the Galerie RDV, Nantes, France. This was a group exhibition of eight Montreal artists presenting different strategies of political resistance.