The exhibition Où vont les mots proposes a dialogue between text and paper, and the landscape. It includes three artist books, two sculptures made from dictionaries, a paper poem installed on the window of the gallery and a large-format, composite mural of a snowy landscape, ink-jet printed onto paper made especially by the artist for this image. Shifu, the Japanese technique for spinning paper into paper threads is featured in these works. The work Portes was later transformed into Inside Passage / Passage intérieur, 2010.

In 2010, parts of this exhibition travelled to Grenfell Art Gallery (formerly known as Sir Wilfrid Grenier College Art Gallery) at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Corner Brook, and were exhibited in an exhibition entitled Where the Words Go curated by Charlotte Jones.

Where do words come from? Could letters of the alphabet be seeds for planting? The image of a woman blowing on a dandelion seed has been part of the cover design of The Larousse Dictionary for many years. Since I was a child, I have sensed words and letters existing like a river or a current of air floating all around me.

In Où vont les mots / Where the Words Go, hundreds of dictionaries have been dismantled and transformed into a series of sculptures and one giant mural. Their printed papers were either torn and recycled into fresh sheets of paper or reconstituted through spinning into long paper threads. A desire to subvert the power and authority of certain types of written texts and to highlight the presence of the paper used in printing these texts were the starting points for this work.

One sentence describes the objective of much of my work: I want to touch words; I want to touch the space between words. My creative process has developed as a series of poetic investigations exploring human experience through language. A love-hate relationship to the written word was born out of loss. When I was 6 years old, my mother died in a car accident. Learning to read and to write coincided with death. This marked the beginning of a dialogue with absence, that I have been exploring, breathing, falling into and ultimately searching for words to describe. Paper, normally the invisible and ignored support material is one of the materials I use to create this presence of absence. My creative process includes researching the etymological roots of words and experimenting with early textile arts technologies such as spinning and weaving. Knowing the stories behind the evolution of words such as: text, (from textus meaning textile in Latin,) to spin, (to draw out of chaos, Latin,) stitch or suture (Sanskrit, word sutra, meaning thread and narrative scriptures) is an important part of this process.

“For over 20,000 years until the industrial revolution, the textile arts were an enormous economic force belonging primarily to women. Because of the perishability of these products, much of this contribution did not find its way into history books. Before writing became the principle means of communicating and recording information, clothing and textiles provided a place for social messages.” ( E. Wayland Barber, Women’s Work)

The spinning in this project is a reminder of this contribution – a remembering through the fingers. In Où vont les mots / Where the Words Go, I am creating space for my own sculptural writing.

Karen Trask, 2008