Description

L’une fait lire l’autre is a concrete poetry installation in two verses written by the artist. The verse on the wall is made from handmade paper couched directly on the wall (couching is a technical papermaking term referring to the transferring of a wet sheet of paper pulp from the paper-making mold to a surface for drying). Through a special technique, the letters were removed or prevented from forming on the mold during the paper making process before couching the paper to the wall. In this way, it is the negative space or the absence of paper in the page that becomes the letter. The verse on the floor is made of cast paper-pulp letters elevated using metal pins. The viewer enters the text, as if walking into a book.

This work was translated to English and presented as Breathing Room at Latitude 53, Edmonton, Alberta in 1999. The poem also appears in the artist book Intersections – Conjonctions).

French Texts:

Première strophe (mur/wall)

Il n’y a pas d’angles dans cette pièce : les murs, blancs et arrondis se tendent comme des bras pour me tenir. Ce vide est le baume que je désire ardemment. Lentement, je commence à écrire les mots. Il n’y a que le papier lisse et blanc, et l’espace vide indulgent de ce corps autrefois interdit. Il attend le contact des mots, le glissement des doigts sur le papier, la décharge d’un corps dans un autre.

Deuxième strophe (plancher/floor)

Ce sont des mots d’une blancheur laiteuse, trop longtemps cachés entre les lignes. Trop longtemps exilés, ils sont hésitants : ombres spectrales non prononcées, un ange blême frémissant. Un texte mère commence dans le silence, sans mots. L’espace vide s’avance autour des lettres. Ce qui était arrière-plan devient premier plan, ce qui était ombre est aussi lumière. Là, un nouveau texte s’écrit par-dessus l’ancien.


Statement

L’une fait lire l’autre was the first work in which I began to see the interdependence between text and the empty space surrounding it — without the empty page the letters are illegible. It was beginning of an investigation into the notion of “nothingness” and its connection to the absence of women in public space and the my realization of the life-long absence of my mother in my life.

Karen Trasks, 2024



Exhibition History

L’une fait lire l’autre (Langage plus)
solo
November 23 – December 21, 2001
Langage plus, Alma, Québec, Canada
February 13 – March 9, 1997
Galerie Clark, Montreal, Québec, Canada

Publications

Gilded tongues: Karen Trask’s words of wisdom and sorrow
Lucinda Catchlove (1997). Hour Magazine, Visual Arts section, Montréal.