Artist Statement

After searching through my personal collection of memories and having traveled to Japan, I began my most recent body of work, glass shoes. My interest in shoes is directly related to my trip to Japan and their customs, one of which being the removing of their shoes. While in Japan, I was not only invited to experience their traditions, but yet, I was expected to follow them. The interesting part for me was not the removal of the shoes, it was the neatly arranged situation that the shoes had created. After returning home I began to create glass shoes, both the functional and the fantastic- and no it is not a Cinderella story- it is however one of past and present fashions that have been driven by beauty, function, status, or even pain.

However, my many attempts have largely been riddled by failure due to the challenges that accompany the desire to make complex works. Imagine, if you will, making a pair of objects the same height, width, thickness, color, now make them a left and a right, as you would a pair of shoes, and things start to get complicated. The second challenge in this body of work is trying to cast shoes that are hollow, as I am not willing to sacrifice the empty space within the shoes that suggest their wearablity and function.

My interest in fashion allowed me to make and design shoes of my own desire, while costume institutes and museum collections helped me to find historical footwear that intrigued me. At first I wished only to create shoes that were intentionally painful to wear, as well as historical shoes that were a reference to a women’s status or inferiority, more simply I wanted shoes to point out a world of double standards. My work has changed over time though, not necessarily due to my personal choices, but rather, my own capabilities, and the challenges that presented themselves along the way. The focus of this work has adapted as it has since become important to me to create setting for my shoes, and no longer in the neatly arranged compositions I had crossed in Japan, but rather, so that my work suggests a mobility without possibility, that the unmotivated steps offered.

I use glass as my main medium of expression because it has allowed me to give my shoes the added quality of beauty, light, desirability, and the way they can sparkle and reflect with a candy appeal, the same reasons I fell in love with glass in the first place.