Worn: footwear, attachment and affective experience
CVAN Tour and Artists’ talk/ Press Day: 24 th January 2018 3-6.30pm
Exhibition runs: 29 September 2017 – 27 January 2018
Monday-Friday 10am-4.30pm: Saturday 10am-4pm.
Warrington Museum & Art Gallery: Museum Street, Warrington, WA1 1JB
Ellen Sampson is delighted to invite you to a Guided Tour and Artists’ Talk about her exhibition, Worn: Footwear, Attachment and Affective Experience at Warrington Museum and Gallery.
Join us for guided tour of exhibitions by artists Holly Rowan Hesson and Ellen Sampson at Warrington Museum & Art Gallery in association with CVAN and Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival.
Shoes are evocative objects, loaded with meanings and memories; from magical shoes in fairy-tales to abandoned and empty shoes resonant with loss. This exhibition explores our relationship with and attachment to shoes. Focusing upon the shoe as an everyday object, it explores how garments and people may become entwined. Through use and wear shoes become a record of the wearer’s lived experience, the paths they have walked, the journeys they have taken, the shoe as a vessel for memory.
Using film, photography and installation, these works explore the ways that attachment to footwear is located in our intimate and tactile relationship to it; attachment created through touch and wear. The manifestations of this attachment are apparent in the ways that a shoe changes: the creases, folds and scuffs, which are the inevitable outcomes of use. Gesture is preserved within the shoe – even when our bodies are gone traces of motion remain. These marks form a web, a map of experience. The worn shoe is a repository of experience, a container of trace.
Ellen Sampson
Ellen Sampson is an artist, curator and writer whose work explores the relationships between bodily experience, memory and clothing. Using film, installation and sculpture she addresses the manner in which material objects can become records of lived experience and how the traces of these experiences can be read or understood by the viewer. In exploring the resonance of worn and used artefacts, Sampson seeks to uncover how attachment to material artefacts is produced and maintained.
Fascinated by the magical shoes in fairy-tales as a child, Sampson completed a degree in anthropology before training as a shoemaker, learning to make shoes at the famous Cordwainers College in London. After several years of running her own company and working in fashion her work developed a more conceptual angle and she returned to Cordwainers to undertake an MA. Her acclaimed Masters project Absences explored empty footwear as a symbol of absence, loss and grief. Sampson recently completed a PhD exploring our attachment to footwear at Royal College of Art, London.