The ecoartspace February 2020 e-Newsletter is now LIVE HERE.

Mariah Reading, Adidas Sunset, 2018, recycled shoe, acrylic paint, digital photograph

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
In any direction you choose.
Dr. Seuss

Shoes are a necessity. We need them to go about our daily routine. Shoes enable us to explore the very landscapes we strive to preserve. Yet, they're one of the most problematic sources of consumer waste in the world. 

Creating a single pair of running shoes generates 30 pounds of carbon dioxide. The 25 billion shoes manufactured around the world every year generate a huge greenhouse gas impact. At the end of a shoe’s life, it's discarded, and spends over 50 years decomposing in a landfill where it will contaminate the water and soil. The midsole of a running shoe, made of ethylene vinyl acetate, takes a whopping 1,000 years to decompose.

While an increasing number of shoe companies are steering their shoe production in a more sustainable direction, there's still a long way to go. Today there is an endless source of shoe waste available to artists to make art from. 

“The one advantage of working with waste material is – it’s everywhere.”  Meghan Price

Meghan Price is a Toronto-based multi-media artist drawn to the significance of process and materials. Meghan works with textiles, print and video, exploring time and what she refers to as human-earth interactions. In her latest series utilizing recycled athletic shoes, she sheds powerful insight into the relationship between waste, and humanity’s place in geological time through stunning low-relief landscape sculptures.

Meghan Price, New Balance 1, 2017, recycled shoes, 15 x 37 x 2 inches

Meghan’s New Balance series evokes layers of the Earth’s crust using an arts-informed inquiry into geology and the seismic impact of human consumption on our planet. “This work specifically references the Earth’s uppermost layers as they are embedded with environmental pollutants including textile materials and residues from their manufacturing,” describes Meghan. 

Meghan Price, New Balance 2, 2017, recycled shoes, 14 x 3 x 2 inches

Landscape painter Mariah Reading was inspired to change her artistic process after reflecting on the waste produced by painting the very landscapes she loved. “As artists, we throw away a lot of waste,” notes Mariah, who is also an avid outdoorswoman. She works to minimize her carbon footprint, and turns her eye to the waste left by humans in nature. When hiking, she picks up trash and paints landscapes on it. Mariah then photographs the object aligned with the physical landscape to both obscure and highlighting the discarded object. 

Single shoes are among the most commonly found waste objects that Mariah finds. “I really enjoy painting shoes because I contemplate who lived in those shoes, and the carbon footprint made by that person in their shoes,” shares Mariah. “The shoe had a life of its own before – and now again, after being discarded.”

Mariah Reading, Devils Boot, 2018, recycled steel-toed boot, acrylic paint, digital photograph

Meghan and Mariah give shoe waste a new life, inspiring the rest of us to walk in a more sustainable direction.

Meghan Price is represented by United Contemporary Gallery in Toronto.   

Mariah Reading's work can be purchased directly through her website.

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Natasha Milijasevic is a Toronto and Miami-based consultant, writer and researcher. Her past research and publications span organizational psychology to patient safety to business strategy. She's the mother of two, and an occasionally exhibiting artist.

Haynes Inlet Portal on the Coos Bay, Oregon. Finished in October 2019, at low tide dawn.  Photo: David Paul Bayles

Located along a surveyed route for the proposed Pacific Connector Pipeline, which is planned for moving fracked gas from Canada to the US Pacific Coast for export to Asia, stands three pavilions, or portals, created by environmental architect Erin Moore, from Eugene, Oregon, along with her research practice team known as FLOAT. Completed last fall 2019, these installations were sited in the landscape as a direct action in resistance to the proposed pipeline, as well as a way to provide multi-species sheltering. The works combine speculative design and habitat architecture, along with activism and ecological aesthetics.

All three portals were constructed on private land owned by community members who are vehemently against the expropriation of their land. Each site is ecologically rich including an estuary, a wetland, and a riparian zone. One of the landowners was arrested for trespassing at the Oregon State Capitol in November where protesters staged a sit-in, not something she had ever done before [more HERE]. The pipeline, if built, will run right through a completed salmon restoration on a creek adjacent to and in including her pasture. Another landowner who will lose his property due to eminent domain is the subject of a video interview online sharing the path the pipeline with take through his family land.

Haynes Inlet Portal. Photo: David Paul Bayles

“The portals visibly place something of value in the path of potential destruction,” states FLOAT. These structures also serve as a metaphor, a circular form that presents an alternative to carrying oil, offering a transformative space for both animals and humans to contemplate the fate of lands that will potentially be abused in the name of progress. Locally harvested soft rush (Juncus effuses) and tule (Schoenoplectus acutus) is thatched around the exterior of the portals, filtering rainwater and collecting moisture and nutrients that are helpful for hosting non human species.

Salmon Portal on Fate Creek, Oregon. This portal sits in the riparian zone along a restored salmon spawning bed.

From FLOAT:

The Portals are intended to transform perceptions of these places by demonstrating their value in terms of ecological holism, nutrient cycling, multi-species sheltering, and habitat biodiversity rather than in terms of extraction and profit. In this way, and as they subvert extraction-based power structures.

The Portals are intended to choreograph the human experience of time as cyclical—in weather, tides, water levels, and planetary movement, and as material decays and accumulates. In this way, the pavilions draw attention to the simultaneous ecological past and future of these lands.

The Portals are located on land that is within the traditional homelands of the Coos, Coquille and Upper Umpqua peoples who were forcibly removed from these lands by the United States government. Today, descendants are citizens of the Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua & Siuslaw Indians, the Coquille Indian Tribe, and the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe.

The Portals were designed by Erin E. Moore and were constructed by members of Moore’s research practice FLOAT (Construction project management: Chris White; Fabrication and installation: Mike Kwilos (lead), Serena Lim, Andrew Loia, Zach Bradby, Molly Winter).

The Portals are located in Southern Oregon. Each are about 2 hours by car from the Eugene, Oregon airport. Hosted site visits are welcome with prior arrangement. 

Portal in Coquille River Watershed on a wetland site. The middle of three along the route of the proposed Pacific Connector Pipeline.  Photo: FLOAT