Silk nails

Conceptually, ballet shoes are associated with dance, with the beauty of ballet and the grace of its movements. Behind the spectacle of a performance, however, lie many years of work on the dancers’ bodies, together with repeated injuries and psychological pressure. Strict discipline, effort and injury act upon the dancer like a forge; here, that idea has been materialised through nails. Objects that can be useful in one context may also become instruments of aggression.

Materially, the shoes are soft across the upper but rigid in the sole. In a conceptual parallel, the sole becomes the dancer’s body and the nails become training, discipline from a very early age and injury. In terms of texture, the softness of the outer satin and inner cotton evokes the delicacy and warmth of ballet movement; the leather sole suggests the physical body, contrasted with the hardness, coldness and slight malleability of the nails. The body must encounter something harder than itself in order to be pierced, just as a human being submits to discipline in order to mould the body. This transformation falls within what Rosalind Krauss might describe as modern sculpture, in that the object’s materiality is carried beyond itself into another context. The shoes have been decontextualised and acquire a new subjective position arising from a search for other inner territories, which in turn entails a redefinition of exterior space. They have become a surreal object that can no longer contain any soft material without tearing it. What was created to contain and protect the feet has become something that moves us beyond a superficial vision of the beauty of dance and towards a deeper understanding of it.