Artist Statement - Lost Shoes

April 2008


I am fascinated by the historical relationships between extremes in social classes - the artist and the noble, the shoe maker and the dandy. I explore the extravagant styles and fashions of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries where for a brief period, men got to play dress up too. This flamboyance has inspired me to create an exaggerated world.

As a costumer I have designed outfits for countless imaginary people, but shoes
often remain on the sketchpad. They are the shoes of the decadent and the elite, the shoes I didn't get to make. In life as in the theatre, it is only the truly wealthy who get really beautiful shoes.

My shoes are like lost treasures as if just discovered; only one of the pair remains, the other having been lost during the passage of time. Each piece nestles within a unique structure as a pearl in its shell. They are contained in their boxes and resting places as if in protection against time and reality.

These life size shoes could have been worn by those whose feet rarely touched the ground, and had no reason to be practical. I imagine the whims of kings; 'something in brocade and silk....with wings' whose loss of an item is inconsequential.

To find a precious item, even only one of a pair, is still a treasure.

Artist Statement - Women's Work

May 2005.

I made the first piece out of scraps of fabric woven together around my feet. I'd dipped the cloth in beeswax after I'd read an old, and much more interesting version of the Red Shoes fairy tale, as retold by Clarissa Estes. Her version was about how much better the hand made shoes were than the shiny shop bought ones, even though they were crudely made. The shop bought ones kill the girl in the end as she dances herself to death.

This work with scraps, bits of leftover costume fabric and worn out clothes, started as an experiment to see if I could salvage something out of the things I still loved. I started to buy small jewels of fabric to add to my hoard of treasure. As I worked I found that any kind of weaving and binding was possible, any kind of shape or form.

Women work, patching up and smoothing out, making do, weaving into a shape that fits better. Somehow it all stays together, like homes kept from falling down by African women who add more mud each day to the walls.