Joy Lavrencik
"Mogadishoe/Mogadishu"
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| (Photos by Patrick Fraser) |
Mogadishoe started, as a play on words and became a serious piece of art work. After reading an article about Somalia, I did some research and realized how tragic life can be in that part of the world: famine, combat victims, female mutilation, rape, and death. My focus moved from the shoe to the foot: humanizing an artistic abstraction. This work represents people who have no shoes whose feet show and tell the story of a different life. The materials I used represent the fragility of life: hogs gut, blood, seeds, leaves, gravel and forest bits. The cotton and silk are fragments of cloth, which I buried with vegetables, fruit, dirt, and rusted metal for months. When I dug them up they were covered with the marks and scars of the earth.
The sculpted feet are twisted and distorted to represent the hardships of those who make it to the refugee camps safely and to honor those who tried and did not.
Our feet and hands silently bear witness to our life.