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Momentos of Motherhood and Reliquaries of Childhood Series
Since my two children were old enough to wear shoes I have collected their cast offs. Generally my children were bought only two pairs of shoes a year: one for winter, one for summer. My daughter also handed her boots down to her brother.
The shoes moulded themselves to my children's distinctive shape and gait and thus expressed their individuality and pathways. I have only just begun to work with these objects now my first child has left home. Initially they have been contextualised in the locations where my children grew up, i.e. the family house in Putney South West London and my childhood home at Hayle Beach in Cornwall where they have spent happy months each year. I have been experimenting with presenting them in a variety of ways to tell stories; stories of identity, stories of walking forwards, but also of lost times and recorded lives.
For example; shoes can be lost lives or foot steps remembered and repeated. They can represent hopeful steps to the future and records of lives lived. Evidence of what happened next, memories of how things used to be and proud walking forward to a new phase. Although the starting point for these works was the collecting of my own children's shoes and consequently they hold a personal charge for me of their particular childhood. These pieces can go on their own journey in the viewers imagination. Shoes left behind can also have more sinister historic connotations and more recently have been used in 2018 to represent children's lives lost in mass shootings plus the plight of immigrants and war victims. This is a work in progress.
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