Description
For Do Undo Redo the artist spun the pages of several hundred dictionaries of all types into one long thread, using the Japanese technique shifu. This thread was wound into a giant ball. For the performance, she unravelled the ball by pushing it through the streets of Sackville, starting at the Mount Allison University campus, then heading to the Main Street, along sidewalks, parks and a cemetery, into Struts Gallery, leaving a trail of paper thread behind. Once completely unwound, she retraced her footsteps and rewound the thread back into a ball, returning to the point of departure. Along the way interested spectators joined in to help. In total, the distance traced by the unwound thread covered approximately five kilometers.
Statement
The performance, Do Undo Redo is inspired of course by the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who is condemned by Zeus to roll a rock to the top of a mountain and repeat endlessly as the rock falls back to the bottom of the mountain. But like Albert Camus in his book, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, I imagine Sisyphus happy in the struggle – neither futile nor without hope.
The unraveling of thread through the campus and town also reminds me of fairy tales like, Hansel and Gretel and Rapunzel who make paths with bread crumbs and hair. But the meaning most present for me in my work undoing texts with spinning and weaving is the feeling that I am remembering through my fingers, the 20,000 years or more of contributions by women to the development of language and culture – contributions largely undervalued and unrecognized. Vestiges of these are still present in our expressions and words: text/textile, hanging by a thread, spinning yarns, the tightly woven fabric of our society. The unraveling of the dictionary represents for me an undermining of the authority of certain types of texts. The dictionary is constantly being updated and is unable to keep abreast of the changes; language is alive and like a river forges its own path.
In making art, creating and destroying go hand-in-hand. By destroying this sculpture, I am also giving it a new life through movement, through performance. In its unmaking, the performance emphasizes the time invested in its making.
Karen Trask, 2017
