The Path Is a Metaphor

2024–25

Installation, moving image, photography, constructed fashion artefacts

Project description

The Path Is a Metaphor is a multi‑component project that explores walking, direction and choice as both physical and philosophical acts. Drawing on religious symbolism, personal history and navigation systems, the work considers how lives are shaped through inherited structures, belief systems and creative deviation.

The project takes the path as a recurring form - historically used to signify morality, virtue and discipline and reconsiders it through lived experience. Raised within a Christian framework, the artist engages with the moral symbolism of the “straight and narrow” versus the “broad and wide”, positioning the creative path as one marked by uncertainty, deviation and productive disruption. Here, difficulty and obstruction are treated not as failure, but as catalysts within artistic process.

Central to the project is the recurring use of the shoe as a form that carries layered associations of gender, authority and movement. Historically positioned as objects that both discipline and enable the feminine body, shoes operate within the work as sites of restriction, regulation and, at moments, found autonomy. Through repeated photographic documentation and installation, the shoe becomes a mediator between belief, control and self‑direction. Framing the act of walking as a negotiation between inherited structures and personal agency.

Installation elements combine navigational symbols - road signs, roundabouts and directional markers - with more intimate, domestic references that suggest inward journeys and personal reflection. Moving image and photography further complicate the work’s temporal and relational dimensions, including images of the artist’s parents’ feet as a quiet acknowledgement that journeys are shaped not only in solitude, but through inheritance, proximity and care.

Throughout the project, shoes operate as philosophical vessels: objects that mediate between body, ground and direction. Rather than functioning symbolically alone, they become material agents through which movement, hesitation and choice are staged. The Path Is a Metaphor proposes navigation not as progress towards a fixed destination, but as an ongoing negotiation between belief, agency and imagination.