In // Sensitive

Shoes are amongst the three-dimensional found forms onto which Marina Dempster works her contemporary translation of the pre-Columbian Huichol tradition of “yarn painting”.  Immersed in this attentive and time-honoured process, multicultural ethnography meets haute couture as she autonomously concerns herself with issues of personal connection to one’s histories and futures by nurturing present narratives, environments, communities and cultures.

These fashion relics are re-adopted and undergo extraordinary ‘back-to-nature’ metamorphoses in Dempster’s charge, becoming magical fetish objects symbolic of our capacity for both healing and reinvention. This transfiguration process is necessarily slow moving and layered, and requires repetitive rhythms and rituals and the use of higher faculties to both re-pattern and re-member the self.

The titles, adjectives of human states of being, speak with irony to the illusory and transient nature of self-perception and the infinite perspectives available to us. Dempster’s sculptures embody an understanding that to change, or evolve, one must first be willing to ‘try on something new’ to reclaim our wholeness, stepping beyond what has been prescribed, conditioned or neglected to realign with a more essential and empowered truth.

While Dempster's sculptures become artifacts of working through her own entanglements, her personal mappings or tracks speak to us at a deeper level where our latent hopes and fears are reflected. Dempster invites us to playfully contemplate the confounding high-heel, “while being everything that pinches, it elevates us in inches, and inevitably makes us more sensitive to the ground we walk on.” - a reminder that we get to choose how to use the power of our imaginations.