Statement

The works in Nœuds d’écoute Listening Knots are inspired by Virginia Woolf’s, The Waves. Originally published in 1931, she called it her “play-poem”. I imagined myself as Virginia Woolf with a camera and a desire to play with bodies of text, the human body, the tide, the ocean and the land; this thought guided the making of the work during a two-year residency at the Université de Moncton and Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. Students, friends, the ocean and the land were active participants.

Nœuds d’écoute Listening Knots includes text-based installations, a video projection and a continuous performance inspired by Virginia Woolf’s, The Waves. Published in 1931, she called it her “play-poem”. Imagine myself as Virginia Woolf with a camera and a desire to play with bodies of text, the human body, the tide, the ocean and the land. This thought guided the making of the work during a two-year residency at the Université de Moncton, Moncton and Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick. Students, friends, the ocean and the land were active participants.

A common story describing the origins of the world often includes a spinner/weaver and most often she is a woman. In Greek mythology, Clotho spins, Lachesis measures and Atropos cuts the thread. The threads of this history are still present in our expressions, woven into the fabric of our society. Let me spin you a tale. We hang by a thread.

The Japanese art of spinning paper into a thread is a technique I often use. Central to the Nœuds d’écoute Listening Knots project was the making of a fishing net using paper- thread spun from the pages of four dictionaries relevant to south-eastern New Brunswick: Le Glossaire acadien, Le Petit Larousse Illustré, Silus Tertias Rand’s English to Mi’kmaq and Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate. A variety of actions using the net were filmed and are presented as part of a series of video vignettes. “Listening knot” is a literal translation of “nœud d’écoute”, the French term for the knot used to make nets.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf is present as work titles and as material in the work. The heart of the book for me is that we are all connected, that there is a thread between me and everyone else, that our bodies and our genders are blurred. Growing up on a farm, I developed a profound respect for the rhythms of nature, but as a teenager, I watched in horror as my father, like many others at the time, cut down trees and brutally straightened a meandering creek to make room for a few more rows of corn. Nœuds d’écoute Listening Knots has allowed me to connect to the land and the water.

— Karen Trask, 2019