baby, what's in that satchel?

for the assemblage component of this art elective, we were divided into groups of 3 - 4 and told to use our $90 budgets to procure as much as we could of one or two types of clothing. then, we had to turn said clothing into some kind of work of art.

one group chose men's shirts and bras, another chose jeans, and yet another chose coat hangers. we chose shoes.

after much opshopping and garage-raiding, we managed to collect at least 25 pairs of shoes and not a clue what to do with them. initial ideas involved making dinosaur suits and giant shoes out of de-constructed individual shoes, but those ideas were nixed in favour of a more dynamic shoe sculpture.

so, after a whole day of drilling and chopping shoes up then lashing them together again, we decided that the result was pretty shit, and so we started again. the good thing is that the final final result is thoroughly satisfactory. as we were assembling our installation, this group of older ladies wandering through the tin sheds gallery came and spoke to us about how our shoes were so evocative of foot-binding. personally, i think the result is more like kinbaku than anything else.

the down side is that working with old shoes seems to have provoked an extremely unsavoury physical reaction in the form of the most toxic cough this side of the southern hemisphere. said illness has been dubbed "shoe flu" by the chickensoupdeliveryman.

process, mucking around and resolution can be viewed here! let the post-rationalisation begin.

update: it seems that someone on flickr is really interested in checking out my teammates, and less interested in looking at the artwork. the work is engaging too! seriously !!