Description
The Poetry Cup is an artist book in the form of a cup placed on a wooden shelf. When opened, it reveals a poem (below) written in pasta letters. The cup is made of cast paper and coloured with acrylic.
Text in the work:
A stirring up,
a holding cup
from milk to curds
a mix of words
and the poem
rises from the bottom
Statement
“Karen Trask’s cast paper pieces, The Distance Between Two Halves and The Poetry Cup, resemble children’s mug, with comments about poetry as a ‘holding cup’ and a ‘stirring cup’ spelled out in alphabet soup letters that spiral down their interior surfaces. Through these pieces, with their childhood associations, Trask captures the idea that language is both a reliquary and a crucible for the earlies memories of individuals and cultures”.
Mary K McIntyre, The Art of the Book ’93
Paper holds an inherent memory. This memory, in its accumulation of layers, allows a cradling of treasures and monstrosities. Memory, both collective and personal, being one of my thematic preoccupations, combines perfectly with my way of handling paper. In these paper works, surface and volume are built up in a multitude of paper pulp layers through the use of molds. In this way, paper is like a metaphor for my work with its dense structures of memory.
Karen Trask, 1990