Cycle in Heels : ODD

pictures by Jeroen Rolf Schoonhoven

"You can't make a dress out of shoes -you wear shoes your don't put them on a dress, it's too heavy, shoes are made for feet"

-I WANT a dress of shoes and I will make it!

I love shoes, especially heels -as you can see in the title of my blog.

I collect shoes, my closet is full of shoes, even when there are ruined, it's always really hard for me to throw them away.

The idea started through a random conversation at a party. Jerome who works at the charity shop for Cancer Research said casually, I have thousands of shoes from Mark&Spencer, all odd, and I don't know what to do with them, i'm going to throw them away…

With Catherine, we jump at this chance.

Those odd shoes are samples or the brand can't be bother to sort out the shoes so just give odd one to the charity shop that make them unsalable. That creates a huge mess symptomatic of a consumerism society where throwing away brand new shoes cost less than paying someone to actually re-form the pair.

But at least we could make a piece of art out of this waste.

So we fill bags from shoes and bring home on my bike (I think i already carried the equivalent of the Eiffel tower on this poor little bike).

Mood board for the shoes dress,Minna Parikka for Lady Gaga, Elsa Schiaparelli’s iconic shoe hat heavily influenced by surrealist Salvador Dali and Alberto Giacometti/ Manolo Blahnik for Liberty/ interesting diversion of the shoes function

The challenge was now to find a structure to hold the weight of the shoes. So I asked to my partner in crime Yueer to help me out with the dress and she create this crinoline skirt with a really strong wire framework.

A shoes fetishist would kill me! drilling hole into shoes hills with my mini drill

The day before the performance, Jerome an i put all the shoes in the Van from the charity shop, and come to my place to collect the dress. My neighbour asked me a bit worried "are you moving out? " no "don't wordy I just going to set up shoes-dress in a gallery and I come back."

Arrived at the gallery for the setting up we decided to change the design last minute) (I sew colourful shoes on the bustier and I suddenly wanted all them black varnish to be more "classy".

Don't worry Sophie, we can do that really quickly)

With theses pointy heels, the corset is a bit like the famous bra designed by JEan Paul Gaultier for Madonna on her Blonde Ambition World Tour in 1990.

Lesson n°37: always have a mini drill in your bag!

Shoes, shoes shoes, even when there's none left, there are still some

Jin helping us suspending shoes with fishing wire

The dress is half-way between the theatrical costume and the live installation. The dress is like a evolutive element which merges into the installation becoming an outfit or a performative element. At the beginning, the skirt is like a flat circle on the floor, when Yueer and I were taking it up in order to dress up Catherine you can feel the surprise in the audience, "this is actually a wearable skirt".

Trying the explain the meaning of the piece to another artist of the exhibition "Well ,first of all, it's just a big pile of shoes".

Hanging up my work for the first time, really exciting!

Sue and Nok the leader of Circus Terminal WORLDWIDE

Circus Terminal’ is an artist-led project that will span 2012-2013. This will be an ongoing collaborative international touring project of both artists who have experienced an academic art education and artists who are self-taught, that maybe described as ‘Outsider artists’ having not experienced art schooling or have experienced exclusion from the contemporary art world.

Sue Kreitzman next to her fabulous piece "Josephine Baker", which one is actually the piece of art?

pictures by Jeroen Rolf Schoonhoven

Sue, my raw model who always inspires and encourages me in my work!

Feel so honoured to be exhibited next to Sue's art piece

trying all the "odd shoes", difficile de trouver chaussure à son pied!

This piece is about finding your place in the world. Sometimes you can feel odd because you don't fit or you feel you are walking on someone else shoes. But there is a redemptive creativity that can make something beautiful out of the chaos and reveals our individuality and our true-self.

"This piece did not start from a concept but from objects- a pile of odd shoes. A charity shop was given about a thousand odd shoes from a mass brand. We jumped at the chance to transform this wasted material, labour force and energy into an artistic piece. We intend to explore the theme of 'ODD' as an object ,subject and feeling out of place through costume and performance."

Catherine feet Yueer & Sophie

This dress is like the stamp of feet on the beach but reversed as a photographic negative, not the traces but the actual feet.

Catherine was the shoes and with Yueer we were logically the feet in order to complement each other

So Catherine was barefoot, and we made shoes with feet, (in the logic of the piece, the feet are not the one wearing the shoes)

It's good because usually i'm using the hands in my creations, quite never use the feet. I find this part quite repulsive (I have theses traumatic vision of this add on TV when I was a child about ingrown nail).

The dressing up in not happening before the performance but during the show and it's like a ritual. First, the skirt, then the corset and finally the accessories presented one by one to the audience.

The transformation through the costume reflects physically the mental evolution of the character in the piece.

the shoes ring

''Sophie you dropped a foot'' (the kind of surrealistic sentence, that you will never hear in my life but part of my every day life)

Shoes fight

"ODD, we never work in pair"

Video of the performance by Jeroen Rolf Schoonhoven:

An interesting work by Miranda Sky exhibited at Circus Terminal (related to own research of the use of Barbie in art)

This series focuses on the absurdity of the concept of femininity.
Barbie, to me is the ultimate representation of femininity, whilst also being a negative role model for little girls.

She promotes the desire for an unattainable physical appearance whilst aiding the beauty industry to profiteer from the low self-esteem she cultivates. The naive style used in the paintings together with some text, questions apparently innocent yet sexualised marketing strategies, aimed at revealing the hidden, underlying consequences for real women through humour.

The pretence of this so-called ‘perfection’ must be attained at whatever cost necessary in today’s society as we have witnessed a rise in plastic surgery, eating disorders and the proliferation of beauty products, as if this is the only means of ensuring happiness through creating an attractive shell. Instead of empowering women, this ‘Photoshop’ propaganda deprives women of their power and true identity. The use of enamels allows no margin for error as it emulates our striving for perfection.

Bright, bold and fake… just like Barbie.

By Miranda Sky

FASHIONISTIC

The idea was to create these absurd characters "fashionistas", weird fashion blogger and and anti-hit girls, dressing up by inventing new trends that never existed like a skirt trouser with a train,

a silver trousers with plastic animals stitched on, scorpions sun glasses, 2 jackets worn at the same time…

We went out on a saturday night performing theses character and interacting with people and see their reactions.

The first questions that people ask are:

-Where are you from?

-Are you really like that in the real life?

-What do you do for living?

But we got really positive reactions "I want to be part of the fashionisitc too!'

I like the fact of performing in an un-theatrical space, in the real world, as if you were a character escaped from a book, a show or a play having direct interaction with your audience and blur the line between performance and reality.