ONLY SHOES CAN SAVE US NOW

Jo Cope Solo Show at Leicester Gallery at De Montfort University. Now Open until Feb 4th 23

‘Fitting In’ exhibition at Z33 Belgium.

Jo Cope and the @shoeshavenames project designers/artists are very excited to be traveling to @z33be exhibition tomorrow for the opening night of the ‘Fitting In’ ✨

the exhibition opens to the public on 2nd October 2022 at the Z33 gallery Hasselt.

Our great thanks to the curators @brankopopovic @thoelenannelies and @rummensmarnix for including us in this amazing show along side artists and designers who we admire including : @dress4ourtime Helen Storey and @lucyjorgeorta

Image by @mouslamrabat

Posted @withrepost • @brankopopovic

Fitting In, exhibition opens 1 October at @z33be and is on show from 02.10 to 26.02.23 at Z33 in Hasselt (Belgium)

About:

The world turns increasingly pluriverse. How can we, without losing ourselves, become part of a larger entity? That question forms the starting point of the group exhibition Fitting In. Artists and designers show how lavish our context can be, if we are open to the many voices around us. They understand identities as multi-layered or fluid. In conversation with you they explore the boundaries between fashion, visual art, photography, design and the world.

Participating artists:

Christian Bakalov, Alia Ali, Lisa Konno & Sarah Blok, Mous Lamrabat, Berre Brans, Elisa Van Joolen, Das Leben am Haverkamp: Dewi Bekker, Anouk van Klaveren & Gino Anthonisse, The Fabricant & Teresa Manzo, CFGNY, Ines Alpha, Tom Van der Borght, Jo Cope & Boutique by Shelter, Marwan Bassiouni, Nazanin Fakoor, Helen Storey, Sanne Vaassen, ADIFF Angela Luna, Anais Hazo-Santorin, Elke Lutgerink, Lotje Heidingsfeld, Lucy & Jorge Orta, Mona Steinhaeusser, Sheltersuit, Thierry Geoffroy, Woman Cave Collective: Léticia Chanliau & Chloé Macary-Carney.

📸 work by @mouslamrabat

Not All Roses are Romantic…

London Craft Week performance and installation at the Garden Museum London

‘The Sordid Tuft’ Jo Cope- 2021

About

This event explores, animates and ruptures the once-symbiotic relationship between humans, roses and the natural world. It comprises a collaboration between a conceptual shoemaker (Jo Cope), performance artist (Hollie Miller), sustainable flower designer (Shane Connolly) and curator (Amy de la Haye). Together, they amplify the politicised and ‘darker’ themes raised by the Garden Museum’s current exhibition ‘Wild & Cultivated: Fashioning the Rose’. These include female-flower metaphors, sweated labour within the artificial roses industry and the detrimental environmental impact of the cut roses we buy today.

Jo Cope’s handcrafted ‘Feminist Rose’ (vegetable tan leather, lamb Nappa and beechwood, 2021) is the central installation. This is partly inspired by the French philosopher George Bataille’s declaration that roses are repugnant and paradoxical; when the petals are stripped away all that is left is a ‘sordid tuft’ (1929). Shane Connolly and Amy de la Haye create an installation and various narratives that orbit around this.

On Monday 9 May, Hollie Miller performs a ‘human-plant hybrid’ provocation involving figurative poses that blur the boundaries between people, objects and their environments and provide a politicised commentary on female fertility, sexuality and female/flower analogies. At drop-in performances over the course of the day, she contorts her body to resemble flower forms, animating and camouflaging with the installation created by Jo Cope, Shane Connolly and Amy de la Haye.

‘She Buds’ - handcrafted shoe/rose metaphors - Jo Cope 2021

Words by Amy de la Haye.

Join Us

10-5pm daily 9th May 2022 - Live performance at 11, 12, 2, 3pm. Installation runs 9th-15th May. Tickets can be purchased on the door, no advance booking needed. for more information visit the Garden Museum

Shoes Have Names Tour

Now Open!

at New Brewery Arts Gallery, Cirencester UK

Shoes Have Names is a colaboration between Jo Cope x Shelter Charity.

Following its success at London Craft Week 2020, the Shoes Have Names exhibition has just opened with its first tour partners New Brewery Arts Gallery in Cirencester.

The exhibition showcases the work of 10 designers who were paired with 10 previously homeless individuals to use craft to tell their stories. Each shoe celebrates their positive steps forward since being helped by Shelter.

Shoes Have Names 2022 exhibition - Featuring Caroline Groves shoe

The show has took on a whole new visual curation concept on the tour, with all of the shoes being displayed on wire gabions stuffed with duvets and bedding which will be donated to homeless refuge charities when the show ends.

Shoes Have Names 2022 exhibition - featuring Tabitha Ringwood’s shoe

The link to bedding as an art prop comes from an innitiative ran by the gallery and the local council durring the covid lockdown, where they housed homeless individuals in their on-site hostel accommodation.

The exhibition is open until April 2nd 2022

Image - Shoes Have Names Exhibition 2022 at New Brewery Arts Cirencester

Interview with ‘On and Beyond the Boot’ curators

interview with Yamit Newman and Pazit Keidar about their current exhibition in Israel ‘On and Beyond the Boot’ interviewed by exhibiting artist Jo Cope.

JC-Could you explain a little bit about your practice as curators, how this came about and your creative vision?

YN/PK-Our vision in curating is to engage people with design. For us it is the best way to tell a story and to ask questions about history, both present and future. We focus on the timelines and associate it with human elements such as innovation, inspiration and beliefs.

In an exhibition we try to take our visitors in a journey in which they would experience this complex texture of creativity.

JC-What has your experience of Lockdown been like in Israel? Have their been any unexpected positives creatively or otherwise?

YN/PK-From the first days the Israeli government’s approach towards the COVID-19 situation was very serious. Israel was in a tight three weeks of quarantine, even when the quarantine was over, we were experiencing a slow everyday life existence.

Cultural life was completely closed for a long time. Museums, Theatres and Tourism are among the areas that has been tremendously affected.

This imposed time was also an amazing opportunity to bring to life forgotten projects and work in a new different pace. We think the opportunity to use this break in a creative structural way, vary from one person to another.

We hope this was an opportunity for our creative exhibitors to do the same.

JC-On & Beyond is an exhibition that you are curating with a unique theme and dialogue around boots as transitional objects, could you explain more about the exhibition concepts?

YN/PK- This exhibition is a voyage in search of boots. At a glance, boots are simply concrete, material objects, made with function in mind. But that’s not all there is to them - a more intensive examination reveals complex objects with layers of meaning that reverberate in other spheres and link the past to the present and the future. This voyage in search of boots leads us to encounters with historical, social, economic, sexual, and other points of contact.

Through the process of observation, we discover infinite transitions in space and media. These questions echo throughout the exhibition, leading us to the dichotomous essence of boots, through an allegorical view of the present:

The transition from boot design and traditional shoemaking to futuristic craft. On the one hand, images that preserve handmade practices and art, and on the other, contemporary design using industrial, digital, and technological tools.

A visual discussion of physical limitations versus abstractions - concrete objects and their functions. The boundary between physical and virtual realities, challenging our existential tools, the social space, and how the fashions and objects of modern design are manifested.

A question of alternatives – to what extent does the choice of a particular object or brand constitute an extension of the self and a personal statement defining a position, authority, or fantasy?

This exhibition showcases the fragile reality we inhabit. Our unexpected reality, with its flexible boundaries and definitions challenging the conventions that make up the field of culture and design, fuses reality and technology, in a state of constant change and speculation about the future - an age with no apparent limits to the power of technology, with the gradual virtualization of physical reality, and clouded by an all-encompassing plague that redefines the human encounter.

Within this space, which oscillates between the concrete and the virtual, the anthropology of objects and design processes forms the touchstone of a reality constructed through movement. Boots, those fashionable objects of desire, serve as a fascinating Petri dish of material, conceptual, and virtual processes.

JC-The artists and designers you have selected for the show all appear to have very different and unique practices. Can you tell us more about some of the artworks that will be on display and why you chose them?

YN/PK-Part of our curatorial research in this exhibition is an understanding of tradition and craft as cultural and visual documentation through a boot.

 We were looking for designers that addressed the slow fashion, industrial, virtual reality and intrusive digital tools that express the transitions in space and media.  On one hand traditional craft, shoemaking, leather, cutting, sewing, soft materials, which talks about the longing for the initial essence of shoemaking. On the other hand we sought to see the industrialization processes and the digital world that shares us in reality, observing the processes of construction and dismantling.

 On and beyond exhibition presents a selection of fascinating designers that address these cultural transitions and the physical transitions in body perception. from shoe to a boot and beyond, through a different and exciting conceptual visual design interpretations.

Exhibiting artists and Designers:

Amir Zobel & Eilam Hanoch Shahaf | Aya Feldman | Orit Freilich | Aviya Serfaty | Alexandra Rudshtain | Rose Archive for Costumes and Textiles, Shenkar | Bar Keshet | Ganit Goldstin | Gillian Golan | Dafna Amar | Deborah Kiwi | Ziva Wagner Epstein | Hannah zinger | Taly Pinhas | Mor Paola Gaash | Maya Kreako | Neta sade| Dani Bar Shay -Hacol Dvash | Nadin Ram | Noam Shapira | Nataf Hirshberg | Nina Rozin | Sapir Tzidon | Omri goren | Joaney KorevaarIrit Abir | Costa Magarakis | Raya Gov | Shelly & Elon Satat-Kombor-Coupleof | Jo Cope |Dana Ben zion Shamsi |Placebo_DFH | Rami Ytzhak

Image - ‘The Opposite of Addiction’ film Featuring Jo Cope’s conceptual boots performed at the Material Movement Gala 2017 at Sadler’s Well Theatre. Currently on show at On and Beyond the Boot.

JC-What do you think is the importance of this exhibition to Israel and the wider context? Is the show venue significant to the audience you wish to inspire and attract?

YN/PK-A design exhibition in Israel appeals to the viewer in various ways; through the exciting history of the young country to the overwhelming successes that young designers are managing to achieve through extensive knowledge of technology and boundless creativity.  The wonderful ‘Farm Gallery’ where the exhibition will be displayed is also an historic place that was build in middle 1900 it's an Arabic authentic architectural gem, the original painted floor and windows were preserved and in 1960 the Arabic house was convert into a galley specializing in multidisciplinary design and art.

JC-Is there any interesting Israeli shoe or boot history that we should know about?

YN/PK- From the Israeli history perspective we chose first to tell the story of the immigrant that worked on the land before Israel was established and secondary to focused on how Israel became a fashion society. Betzalel and Shankar Design Academy are examples which show the great work of the design, art and technologic aspect of boots.

On and Beyond exhibition at The Farm Gallery in Holon until Jan 2022