Being a genuine “shoeholic” I just couldn’t possibly pass these gorgeous pieces by Marina Dempster – visual artist and photographer born in Mexico and based in Toronto, Canada. Unwearable but absolutely fabulous!
"My current series draws from a fascination with the idea of shoes being an extension of the body through which we transmit information to the brain about the terrain over which we travel. The confounding high-heel, while being everything that pinches, elevates us in inches, and inevitably makes us more sensitive to the ground we walk on."
Marina Dempster refers to her work as 'sculpture' using the term's secondary definition as “a natural indentation or other marking on a plant or animal.” Her primary technique is a contemporary translation of the pre-Columbian Huichol art of ‘transformational yarn painting’; preparing a form with a new skin of bees’ wax and pine-resin (traditionally called cera de campeche), which is then meticulously embedded with yarns or beads with the pressure of the fingertips and other improvised tools.
This decidedly labour intensive and thus contemplative technique is a key to Dempster's process as an artist and is a means for her to make sense of sensation. Her resonant sculptural metaphors are personal expressions of thoughts, dreams, intuitions and aspirations and are intended as a celebration of the collective human imagination and as a reminder that there are transformative and polychromatic ways of being, thinking and orienting oneself in relationship to the world's biosphere and ethnosphere.
“A Good Print”, "Ebullient", "Mutable", "Horny", mixed media: found shoes, bees' wax/pine resin, glass seed beads, feathers, yarns, dyed badger hair.
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