'Worn'- Ellen Sampson

Ellen Sampson is delighted to invite you to her new exhibition, Worn at A side B-side Gallery.

Shoes are evocative objects, loaded with meanings and memories; from magical shoes in fairy-tales to abandoned and empty shoes resonant with loss. This exhibition explores our relationship with and attachment to shoes. Focusing upon the shoe as an everyday object, it explores how garments and people may become entwined. Through use and wear shoes become a record of the wearer’s lived ex- perience, the paths they have walked, the journeys they have taken, the shoe as a vessel for memory.

Gesture is preserved within the shoe – even when our bodies are gone traces of motion remain. These marks form a web, a map of experience. The worn shoe is a repository of experience, a container of trace.

Using lm, photography and installation, these works explore the ways that attachment to footwear is located in our intimate and tactile relationship to it; attachment created through touch and wear. The manifestations of this attachment are apparent in the ways that a shoe changes: the creases, folds and scu s, which are the inevitable outcomes of use..

ELLEN SAMPSON

Ellen Sampson is an artist, curator and writer whose work explores the relationships between bodily experience, memory and clothing. Using lm, installation and sculpture she addresses the manner in which material objects can become records of lived experience and how the traces of these expe- riences can be read or understood by the viewer. In exploring the resonance of worn and used arte- facts, Sampson seeks to uncover how attachment to material artefacts is produced and maintained.

Sampson recently completed a PhD at Royal College of Art, London.