Statement

Inspiration for the making of  La marée monte / Rising Tide: being without a home is an ever-increasing dilemma in the world today. Although, I’ve experienced some difficult domestic situations, I’ve never felt homeless. Climate change will force more migrations creating ever more homelessness.

Making this work reminded me of the blue fields of flowering flax. The blue of the sky and the ocean. Our bodies are mostly water, our blood inside the body is blue. What happens when there is only the sky and the ocean to shelter us?

Homelessness is an interesting choice of theme for the biennale given that flax straw was once a common material for insulating homes, for making mattresses, and continues to be used for making clothing, paper and linens.

The element of time is important in my work. Sculpture often involves a lot of steps and in this work there is a lot of transformation of materials. Beginning with flax straw – it is soaked then cooked with soda ash to remove lignin – the structural glue of the plant. The fibres are then beaten in a mechanical beater – flax straw is too strong to be hand beaten. The resulting pulp, some of which was tinted with a blue pigment, the rest was left in a natural grey-beige state, ready for making sheets of linen paper.

The paper was cut into strips and spun into paper threads using a Japanese technique called shifu.  The threads were core-spun over a fine wire and knotted using a technique for making fishing nets – this adds strength while at the same time creating transparency and a sense of presence and absence.

This open weave, an interconnected structure can be read as a representation of how humans are interconnected both with each other and with the natural world.

My goal is to create a work that gives an impression of both strength and fragility, as well as the urgency of time passing.

Karen Trask, 2024