Do Your Feet Hurt????

Over the last 54 weeks, I have walked more than 3 million steps.....

This made me start thinking about my shoes. Personally, I don't care for shoes. They feel unnatural to me. I feel like my feet are entombed and doomed to an eternity of solitary confinement when I wear them.

I love to feel the connection I have to the world around me through my feet. I can't explain it, but if I'm having a bad day, a few minutes of foot to earth contact makes it better (well, that and red lipstick - red lipstick makes any day a better day).

It turns out I have been into earthing since childhood. I grew up in a rural area where going outside barefoot was no big deal. My mom hated shoes as well, when I was growing up (and then she asks where I got my hippie ways from), so it wasn't forced upon us. If you wanted to go outside without your shoes on, hey no big deal. God made dirt, and dirt don't hurt... was a mantra with me and my brothers (this applied to getting dirty, covered in mud, eating food that dropped on the ground, etc. - we likely had insanely great digestive biomes).

I wanted to make something more personal than a map for my personal geography. I started thinking about the shoes I have and the wear and tear they endure day in and day out. How our shoes wear tell a lot about us.

Even though I don't like wearing shoes, I have connections to those shoes. I remember the shoes I was wearing when certain events happened (the orange ballet flats that became the "lucky" shoes during the 2010 World Series), my husband's graduation party/our engagement party that was the last time I wore my black patent pumps, the hiking boots I carried through Yosemite when I had such a reaction to bug bites I couldn't keep my shoes on...

The point being, our shoes are an extension of us in some ways. As much as I love being barefoot, I no longer live a life that allows that (living in SF is a dangerous place to barefoot).

I took photos of the soles of all of my shoes, mocs and slippers and am going to create an image using the soles.

My goal is to create an image that contains 3.3 million shoe soles (this probably will not happen before this is due, but I can try to get a move on it.

I will create brushes out of each sole so I can paint with the images. Eventually I want to print it at 4'x6' (there's a printing company in my building that may be able to make it a canvas for me).

Here is a random sampling from my shoes...