While browsing for strange shoes online the other day, I came across something I’ve never seen before: uniquely bizarre shoes by the German artist, Iris Schieferstein. Something envisioned with the prospect of “new”. But, more than epitomizing “new” these shoes deftly illustrated “avant-garde” and shoes as a new form of art. These are the type of shoes that could zealously sit upon one’s dresser or other piece of furniture, simply to sit there. Simply to generate conceptions and foster conversations. This blank and rigidly stiff, fresh off-white canvas, smelling still as the back of the dusty local art store awaits dialogue and discussion. Let the world as one enjoy these pieces of bizarre artistry.
Death becomes life and life becomes death in the small circular world of the artist. Schieferstein exclusively uses dead animals as the material for each and every shoes – joining them together to complete a monstrous form that can be worn on one’s feet. While some may find her work shocking, it’s not all that different than any other kind of taxidermy. Not all that different from any kind of other animal product we use and consume every day in our society. “There might be some people who find it shocking, but it’s not really all that shocking because you can feel it everywhere; what you eat, what you’re wearing… This is all animal,” Schieferstein once said. “If you worked in a slaughter house, then that experience would be shocking. I don’t think I’m shocking. I just try to get in touch with people in a different way. The audience can approach it from any direction they want.”
Here, gaze at some of the artist’s most thought-provoking footwear through years. As she also once said, “The earlier you die – the longer you are dead.”
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