April 28 - These Boots

I made this art piece for an exhibition a while ago. The show was called "These Boots" and the brief was to make a piece by altering a pair of shoes/boots so they tell a story.

For the piece I wrote this story and attached it to the back of the box they were displayed in. The story was this -

"These Boots had an identity crisis from the very beginning. It wasn’t just that they wanted to be something else, they also wanted to think outside the square and that wasn’t easy.
It was the postcard that finally did it. Just an innocent-looking thing that arrived one sunny spring afternoon. These boots had been relatively happy until that moment. Well, at least they thought so. The postcard was from a friend travelling around the world. It smelled of exotic, faraway places and hinted at new worlds and new ways of thinking. It spoke of freedom.
Freedom had been just another word until that moment but now it brought about alteration and innovation. It was the reason behind the whole redecoration thing and influenced the new designs and textures that now emerged. The designs and desires had been there all along, really. They’d just been hidden behind a facade of conservatism. A facade that had been broken down on that sunny spring afternoon by the idea of freedom.

From that moment on creativity had emerged and made itself known. That creativity provided the energy for the painting and beadwork that adorned the previously conservative boots.
Freedom of speech also emerged during this time. Long-repressed ideas and opinions sought a way out from the dungeons of the mind. The boots discovered how easy it was to express feelings and thoughts. Thoughts about the meaning of life and the nature of time and many other things cascaded from a mind that had been freed from its imprisonment.
Life is all about creation. In every moment of every day we are creating the reality we see. What we see is what we expect to see as a result of our conditioning and environment. We see with our brain, not our eyes. The eyes are just the way we capture information for our brain to process. The world we create for ourselves is totally personal and unique. Just like these boots."

I had a lot of fun making the piece and just today I found it in the corner of my studio. It looks a bit worn and sad and insects have made a home in them. I realised that the boots had embarked on a new journey - this time the inevitable process of decay that is a fact of life itself. The cycle of life.

As everything else, art is ephemeral.