The Wisdom Is in Your Feet

2023–24

Installation, performance, moving image, constructed footwear artefacts

Project description

The Wisdom Is in Your Feet is a performance‑led and installation‑based project that explores shoes and feet as sites of knowledge, belief and embodied experience. Bringing together handcrafted footwear artefacts, moving image and participatory elements, the project considers walking as a philosophical act through which meaning, direction and value are negotiated.

Grounded in the artist’s background in fashion, performance and leathercraft, the work reimagines shoes beyond their functional role, positioning them instead as vessels that mediate between body and ground. The project draws on familial histories of shoemaking while resisting nostalgia, treating making as a method through which inherited knowledge is reworked rather than preserved intact.

Central to the project is the shoe as a gendered form that operates between restriction, authority and agency. Historically implicated in disciplining the feminine body, shoes function within the work as mechanisms that regulate posture, movement and behaviour, while also carrying the potential for self‑direction and autonomy. By foregrounding feet - a bodily extremity often hidden, controlled or overlooked, the project reframes walking as an act through which power is negotiated rather than merely expressed.

Audience participation is used to slow attention towards the ground, encouraging a mode of thinking through the body rather than about it. Paths, directions and modes of movement are presented not as fixed routes, but as propositions, allowing visitors to consider how journeys are shaped by belief systems, social structures and personal choice. The gallery space itself becomes a contemplative environment, where acts of movement, pause and reflection operate as tools for reorientation.

The Wisdom Is in Your Feet situates shoes as philosophical and cultural instruments - objects that carry traces of labour, belief and desire. Rather than treating wisdom as abstract or cerebral, the project insists on its emergence through lived, embodied experience.

Documentation

Photography: Scott Murray
Performance documentation: Faye Parker