THE DIVIDED SELF

The Divided Self is a pair of the artists’ worn out boots, plated in a carapace of pure silver at one of the last surviving family silver-platers in Sheffield. This is one of 15 pairs of leather boots, uniform in manufacturer, style, and material accumulated between 2010 and 2025, deliberately worn to failure by the artist, replaced, and retained. Each pair functions as a shed skin: materially the same, temporally distinct, each recording a distinct year in the artists’ life.

The silvered boots are bound together by entwined laces: one stands upright while the other collapses onto its side, pulled yet not rescued. The configuration stages an internal struggle—between resolve and surrender, good and evil, action and doubt—understood not as opposing forces but as conditions that coexist within a single body. Standing and fallen, bound yet divided, each sculpture becomes a quiet memento mori: a record of time lived, worn through, and carried forward.

The visible hole worn through the sole of the fallen right boot suggests a stigmata, the boots operating as contemporary relics: secular objects that carry the trace of belief, labour, and endurance. The boots are plated in silver, a process that transforms worn, functional objects into reflective, monumentalised forms. Whilst making playful reference to the secular sanctification of children’s first shoes (with an external layer of pewter or silver), popular in the 1970s, the artists use silver to also invoke the language of medieval reliquaries while simultaneously introducing artifice and distance, raising questions about value, sanctification, and preservation.

This piece was technically extremely difficult to make and required 100s of hours of experimentation and work. Completely metalising a pair of large leather boots inside as well as out in the sculpted configuration with the laces, plus achieving a mirror finish, was originally considered unachievable. To realise the artwork, the artists travelled to Sheffield, heartland of British silver plate, to highlight the technical/ engineering innovation and craftsmanship born in the North of England and to celebrate its industrial prowess, now sadly diminished. The sculpture therefore also operates as an index of disappearing industrial infrastructures and the communities of specialised labour that sustain them. The “world” on which the boots exist is a 2ft x 2ft slab of Yorkshire Limestone, quarried and cut to shape from a bolder by a family firm in Yorkshire.