Wizard of Oz Shoes - Critical Making

From January to April of 2013, during my MA, I was in an awesome grad course called The Book as Object: Fine Printing, Artists’ Books, Chapbooks, and Graphic Novels (taught by the amazing Dr. Jon Bath). 

The course included several critical making assignments. I'm planning on posting about all the ones I did and on the benefits of critical making in general, but for now, here is the one where the constraint was to make one textual object out of another textual object.

I've always wanted to make a pair of shoes that had a text of some sort on them, so when this assignment came up I was prepared. I had an old pair of ballet flats, mod-podge, and even a text picked out: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in which, of course, shoes figure quite prominently.

I found a copy of the first edition of the WWoO online (go check it out - it is gorgeous!), did some planning, and then got to work.

My general plan was to use quotations I liked as a background, with favourite images overtop. The planning is where the majority of the "critical" part of the making comes in: what quotations do I choose? Do I arrange in chronological order? What images are appropriate to place with which textual material? I ended up going more by the shape of the text and where I needed it than placing it in context - the constraint of using the shape of one form on the other was more difficult to maneuver than expected. In some places, like with the one scene of the Tin Man, I tried to place a quotation near him; however, since you would not be using these shoes to read the text primarily, I took aesthetics and practicality as my first concerns.

I quickly found it was more difficult than I expected. Because I was doing this basically in a one-off making session, I didn't have time to try arrange everything; I had to estimate as best as I could. Furthermore, mod-podge didn't stick especially well to the faux-leathery material of the shoes, but I discovered the key was to apply liberally and then give it a lot of time to dry.

The most difficult part was definitely fitting around the curves of the shoes.

I did the work in layers.

  

Luckily, I printed off double copies of the textual material. It was really hard to judge how much I would need to cover the shoes, and ended up using nearly all the text I printed off, even just to use as a kind of filler underneath other layers so that the original shoe wouldn't show through.

Of course, predictably, the whole process made quite a mess.

But the finished product, I think, was worth it! Unfortunately, I'm going to have to modify them a bit more, because the paper along the edge made them a bit too small to wear, but overall? I think they turned out lovely.

I later took a black marker to color where the paper went over the edge of the sole. 

Ignore my funny coloured feet - poor circulation, a cold day, and a weird flash/colour thing going on don't help!
But you can see how on the side I placed the images. In the future, I would place more, I think.