Strathnaver Museum & Mackay Country Community Trust Moving Times & Museum Tales
The Life and Times of The Melness Shoe
Joanne B Karr – Museum Artist in Residence
My work has been selected for juried exhibitions in locations which include South Korea, Germany, Australia, USA as well as Visual Arts Scotland at The Royal Scottish Academy. Touring exhibitions in Scotland and New Zealand resulted from a two year collaboration with New Zealand artist Lynn Taylor.
I was Invited by the Su-Ho Paper Museum and Chaoyang University, Taiwan, as artist-in-residence. Lancashire based Horse and Bamboo Theatre commissioned me to make grass costumes for their production ‘Angus’ weaver of grass, touring to sell out shows in 2012. The ways in which these items were made was a mystery renowned art therapist, Joyce Laing, wished to solve. I am continuing to make full size replicas of the now fragile grass garments made by the Uist artist Angus MacPhee to be housed in the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre. I am currently collaborating with Whitworth Art Gallery Manchester and am also artist-in-residence for the Wigtown Book Festival. I am one of four artists who were recipients of a Museums Galleries Scotland and Creative Scotland ‘Iconic Artists in Iconic Places’ grant.
I have been commissioned by Japanese fashion designer, Kyoko Ide, to make work for their two design shops in Tokyo in 2013. The Botanical Society of Scotland has invited me to give a presentation about my work at their AGM in 2013 at The Royal Botanical Gardens, Edinburgh. I continue to work with both Caithness Horizons and Strathnaver Museum on a range of other new projects inspired by local people and themes.
Joanne worked with the pupils at Tongue Primary school on shoe themed activities. The children put a collection together in a decorated shoe box to post to Rebecca Shawcross, the Keeper of The Concealed Shoe Directory at Northampton Shoe Museum, so that the Melness shoe has now been added to The Directory. Joanne helped the pupils in Tongue primary school to make a small book about the objects which had been concealed within the walls of the house in Melness. The Northampton Shoe Museum has added the paper shoes and artwork from Tongue Primary school to their collection. During her Residency Joanne was inspired to make a series of six new works - shoes being the common theme. They are displayed in traditional museum boxes and labeled with the source of inspiration.
Joanne’s Residency
Overwhelmed with objects and stories in Strathnaver Museum, Joanne decided to find out more about the objects which had remained a mystery 40 years after they were donated to the museum. A lady’s shoe and a dogskin buoy were donated to the museum in the 1970’s. They had been concealed within the walls of a house in Melness along with a whisky bottle. That’s all that was known. Joanne has since discovered that there is a ‘directory of concealed shoes’ at the museum in Northampton. Northampton was known for it’s shoe manufacturing. They have over 1,500 shoes in the ‘directory of concealed shoes’ and The Melness Shoe wasn’t one of them. Shoes were apparently concealed in buildings as good luck tokens or to ward off evil spirits. The practice was done in secret and not talked about which makes research difficult. They are usually discovered when a house is being renovated or knocked down.
Taking The Melness Shoe as her inspiration Joanne B Kaar, made 200 paper shoes and hid them from Balnakeil to John O’Groats. She drove 290 miles on her mission, and concealing paper shoes in phone boxes, egg honesty boxes, hotels, B&B's, Banks, Hairdressers, mail boxes, green houses, boats, travelling library vans, museums, stone walls and more... Each of the paper shoes concealed around Mackay Country in 2012 contains information about The Melness Shoe and also asks if you know any more about it or if you have ever found anything unusual concealed within walls. Joanne has had a few interesting e-mails from finders of paper shoes and hopes that people might be intrigued enough to visit Strathnaver Museum and see the real one.
