No Woman Is an Island of Shoes

2025

Performance, installation, constructed fashion artefacts

Project description

No Woman Is an Island of Shoes is a performance-led project that examines mobility, solidarity and restriction through the metaphor of Britain as an island. Developed in response to contemporary political conditions surrounding borders, migration and isolation, the work considers how bodies are bound together or separated through systems of movement, value and exclusion.

The project unfolds through a series of constructed shoe-based artefacts that regulate how bodies walk, stand and occupy space. Across three interconnected formations, walking devices designed for one, two and three participants require cooperation, misalignment and shared effort. Movement becomes a collective task, foregrounding walking as a social and political action rather than an individual freedom. In one configuration, participants must work together to rotate a large walking circle, framing collective motion as an act of solidarity.

Other elements immobilise the feet entirely. Static forms bind both shoes together, materially restricting movement and situating the body in enforced stillness. These structures reference the experience of being trapped within systems that no longer reflect shared values, suggesting that restrictions imposed on others ultimately become self-binding. Constraint operates here as both physical condition and warning.

The project also incorporates a series titled Stop the Boat Shoes, which examines how style, class and prejudice intersect through fashion. Referencing the boat shoe as a marker of social identity, these works respond to the language of anti‑migration discourse by foregrounding the dehumanisation embedded in numerical representations of migration. Weekly government statistics are rendered onto the surface of the shoes, abstracting data while insisting on its material and ethical weight.

Designed to be constructed onsite and transported digitally or as soft objects accompanying the artist, No Woman Is an Island of Shoes foregrounds collaboration, adaptability and shared authorship. The work remains intentionally open-ended, inviting audiences to project their own experiences and to consider the conditions under which collective movement, physical and social becomes possible.

Documentation

Photography: Ksenija Mikor

Presented at

Galerija Velenje, Slovenia — Solo presentation, July–August 2025