JULIA BETTS
  • portfolio
  • about
  • cv
  • portfolio
  • about
  • cv
Search

2013

untitled

shoes

 Looking at high heeled shoes, I became bothered with the contradiction between my experience of high heels and the appearance of high heels. I associate heels with pain and discomfort, but there outward appearance is shiny, plastic, and beautiful. Inconsistencies like this bother me and I became curious what the truth was inside the heels. I began to saw the heels from shoes I collected to discover what was inside. In alignment with my experience of heels, I found gritty materials, toxic fumes, and sharp nails. 

Self portrait

digital photographs rolled and cut


(work in progress) 

Picture
Picture

Untitled

shoes

In this piece, I am creating a clothing inspired sculpture out of shoes and shoelaces. As I am worked with the materials, I began to notice corsets forming in patterns of the design. Corsets, in a manner of thinking, have an opposite function from shoes. Corsets are meant to constrain the body and shoes are designed for mobility of the body. With this piece, I am concerned with the tension between constraint and liberation of movement.

(work in progress)

Picture
Picture
Picture

untitled

For this piece, I created skin-colored shards meant to look like detached pieces or bandages from a body. After creating the pieces, I adhered them to wood panels and then peeled them off leaving only fossil-like traces of the pieces. Finally, I scanned the shards and then printed out large scale photographs. 

In the installation, the actual orginal pieces are missing and only the artifacts remain. Both the wood panels and the digital photographs are only ghosts of the original pieces I created. Even a digital photograph , although it appears very realistic and three dimensional, is only an illusion and a copy of something that was.  The process leaves the viewer with only remnants of remnants. 

(work in progress)
  • portfolio
  • about
  • cv