Only Shoes Can Save Us Now

2023

Installation, performance, moving image, sculptural footwear artefacts

Project description

Only Shoes Can Save Us Now is a project that brings together performance, sculpture and moving image to examine shoes as carriers of belief, care and cultural meaning. Drawing on shoemaking traditions, collaborative performance and conceptual installation, the work situates footwear as a site through which questions of identity, faith and wellbeing are negotiated.

Developed as a cumulative body of work, the project brings new pieces into dialogue with earlier works, allowing ideas to recur, mutate and accrue meaning over time. Rather than presenting a linear progression, the project foregrounds repetition and return, positioning shoes as objects that retain traces of labour, memory and bodily encounter.

Central to the project is the shoe as a gendered form that operates between authority, restriction and care. Historically implicated in shaping posture, value and perception of the feminine body, shoes function within the work as devices that regulate movement while offering moments of protection, repair and found autonomy. The title signals both urgency and irony, proposing footwear not as solution, but as a lens through which systems of belief, responsibility and hope are exposed.

The project is informed by the artist’s early professional experiences in care‑based labour, alongside familial histories of shoemaking rooted in the local industry of Leicestershire. Craft operates here not as heritage alone, but as a living methodology through which attention, touch and repair are foregrounded. Acts of making and collaboration become modes of care, situating the work within a wider ecology of shared labour across performance, choreography, visual art and fashion.

Through installation, live action and documentation, Only Shoes Can Save Us Now positions shoes as philosophical vessels — mediators between body and world that carry emotional, social and ethical weight. The work resists resolution, instead holding open questions around faith, vulnerability and how care might be practiced through material encounter.

Documentation

Photography: Nigel Essex
Film: Alex