CRUMP 2020

Through my lifelong art practice rooted in craft-based processes, I aim to break down the dominant hierarchies of fine art, craft, and design that have downplayed the socio-cultural value of footwear-making. I provoke awareness of how mass footwear production and consumption profoundly and negatively affects individuals, particularly targeted groups of women and people of color, the climate, and our planet.

The cowboy boot is an iconic symbol of America’s idealized vision of itself: rugged individualism, westward expansion, and strength of character. Despite near obliteration by the arc of mechanized footwear production, western bootmaking has been tenuously ensured by a contemporary influx of women like me.

Women historically have been denied access to an acquisition of bootmaking knowledge through the systems in place for passing on these specialized techniques. I use my craft process as methodology to parse ideas and to create art that communicates experience, is grounded in questions, and provokes scholarly research into traditions of harm.

Instead of adding to the Western anthology with client-based work, as is typical, I build boots for exhibition that use the iconography of the American West to manipulate the strong cultural associations of these symbols.

CRUMP 2020 responds to publicly acceptable violent words towards women. A woman posted anti-racist resources on my small town Facebook community page, and a local Boyscout leader named Crump reponded “If I call you a fat, ugly cow and you deny it, just proves that you are one! Blocked!” In over 300 responses only one person questioned his aggressive language. We’re used to it. I isolate these words, slowly stitching them in gold leather, to reveal their violence. Western boots represent the character of men. The creative process that produced these boots is itself a historically gendered, and this exclusionary endangered craft practice is being kept alive actively by women today. In exhibition, I pair these boots with an 1800s cast-iron bootjack called “Naughty Nellie”, where one steps on her face and breasts and wedges a boot heel between her legs to pull off the boots.