On An Overgrown Path
by Ruth Pettus
November 17 - January 7, 2009

"But now the salmon-fishers moist
Their leather boats begin to hoist
And, like Antipodes in shoes,
Have shod their heads in their canoes."

-- Andrew Marvel (1621 - 1678)
Upon Appleton House

"Generations have trod, have trod, have trod. And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears the man's smudge and bares man's smell: the soil is bare now, nor can foot feel being shod."

--Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
God's Grandeur

On An Overgrown Path is an evocative piano composition by Leo Janacek (1900 - 1912). After hearing it performed by Alain Planès last year, I thought the title was a perfect fit as a description for this project.

The shoes take a walk on an imaginary "overgrown path." The path, made of boxes covered in pine needles, sand and salt, is elevated to contain their movement and painted white to provide a focus. The shoes have no specific designations but represent indisciminate lives past and present, a history of travel - its exigencies and the terrain over which many have traversed. Only the vistas in the small ink washes hint at a landscape surrounding the path and in spite of their small scale they suggest a landscape of great space and distance.

These ink studies are part of an ongoing project, "The Horizon Series," a group of ink wash drawings depicting a landscape of subtle light and form. After tearing large sheets of paper for that original project I was left with long strips that I decided to use by resizing them to a much smaller scale.

Working on a small area of paper to suggest a landscape of indeterminate space is also a reaction to the "supersize" quality of some of the work seen in museums and of my own large paintings. As I traveled this summer I did some of these pieces in a cramped hostel room in London, definitely working to scale.

I selected the lines of poetry at the top of the page because they connect two different and somewhat opposite aspects of my work with shoes. The humor and theatricality of Andrew Marvel's lines are an improvised adventure into the imagination. The weight and pathos implicit in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins reflect darker more catastrophic themes. The shoes are in many ways a combination of the two extremes. They, too, incorporate an amalgam of leftovers stumbled over during haphazard journeys to unknown destinations, where pratfalls and accidental failings' exist side by side with disaster and devastation.

Distance and Proximity: Ruth Pettus' Shoes and Horizons

Convictions, directions, opinions, are of less importance than sensible shoes.

-- Thomas A. Clark, In Praise of Walking

The pleasure of being in crowds is a mysterious expression of sensual job in the multiplication of Number.

-- Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals

We can walk between two places and in so doing establish a link between them, bring them into a warmth of contact, like introducing two friends.

-- Thomas A. Clark, In Praise of Walking

We can walk between two places. We are one and we belong. As much as the inky horizons in Ruth Pettus' landscapes seem desolate, barren and uninhabited, her unruly shoes, even when considered singularly, suggest a teeming world. Pettus' amassment of dilapidated and resuscitated shoes brings to mind communities and individuals, the social and singular natures of human beings. Baudelaire wrote that multitude and solitude are "equal and interchangeable terms for the active and fertile poet," and so they are for Pettus' shoes. The sensual joy found in the multitude is reinforced by the pleasure one takes in the vidual ingenuity of a particular shoe. The ebb and flow between the individual and the crowd, between the singular and the many, make us consider distinctions betweent eh intimate and the vast, between detail and magnitude. In Pettus' collection of enticingly non-functional shoes, the crowd and the individual take on a similar emotional and iconci weight. Each shoe is a distinct visual experience, but the group becomes powerful when individual differences such as chunks of brink and lumps of charcoal, black heft and thin-solded wightlessness, disappear into the engulfing mass of a generous crowd.

We can walk between two places. We can move from history to history. Pettus' shoes encapsulate multiple histories and multiple stories. They manifest local characteristics, local customs, local climte, and local fashions while creating new fashions we have yet to imagine. They speak of an auspicious beginning on some pristine pedestal, of a shabby demise and a miraculous (if strange) reconstruction. The history of travel and motion is implicit in their original purpose. These are real shoes that were made in a real place and worn by real people. The shoes became scraps, either found by or bequeathed to the artist. Encrusted with wax and detritus, they shift from practical to improbable, their original functionality derailed by old sticks and rocks and concrete. Who but Flannery O'Connor's Hazel Motes would wear them?

We can walk between two places. We shift between imagination and reality. Pettus is an alchemist and a lover of common substances. Her work is a transmutation of materials, from familiar equipment to raw, aesthetic matter, from object to enigma. Her shoes slip from the world of function to the world of appearances. Although Pettus' shoes are removed from their practical origins, the impact of the materials Pettus uses -- wax, sand rocks, rusted metal, dried lemons, and other incongruous substances -- creates an almost unbelievable new reality. Shedding workaday fact for fancy, her shoes are simultaneously ugly, harsh, gentle, capricious, frightening and amusing. They are tied up with twine, cinched and dqueezed by string and laces and hemp, perched upon rocks and bricks, lashed to decaying pieces of wood, bursting with hirsute wires, swathed in canvas, wrapped in netting, given driftwood wings, stuffed with straw and dried plants, expanded, widened, lengthened, crushed, flattened, framed, filled, sheathed, bursting, coated, wrapped, shellacked, bucked and belted in, stuffed, shoved into tin cans, fused to impossible states of being. Their tongues wag and sometimes go missing. They are soulful and soleless.

We can walk between two places. We connect through conventions and signs. By juxtaposing her small ink washes and her crowds of shoes, Pettus implicitly asks us to consider the conventions of sculpture and painting and to create bridges between the two. Pettus' love of gesture, sometimes quiet, sometimes rough, is evident in both her two-dimentionsional and three-dimensional work. She is interested in texture, in tone, in clashing juxtapositions, in formal relationships between light and dark, in contrasts between jagged and tender. Her paintings, which for many years have deftly explored the theme and variations of figure and landscape, often seem to have an energetic life of their own. They want to push off of the canvas in textures volutes to engage with the space beyond their surface. Her shoes are similarly gestural, with wiry protrusions and jutting sticks extending the original objects into unforeseen spatial dimensions. In this exhibition, it is particularly interesting to consider this gatehring of markedly singular objects as a cohesive group. All of a sudden, what at first appears to be a collection of individual sculptures can be seen as a form of large-scale painting. Appearing against a pale ground of sand and needle-strewn boxes, the shoes become brush strokes, gestures, mark-making across the canvas of the gallery itself.

We can walk between two places. We hover between departure and arrival. In Pettus' installation, traces of movement and elements of suspension coincide. The endless monochromatic rhythm of gentle horizons and the staccato of rough shoes combine to create a third sensation of passage, stirring, migration. As Pettus' shoes spread across and occupy the gallery floor, they pull histories of transit and flux behind them. One can see pilgrims and soldiers, flâneurs and roving mendicants, wanderers and window shoppers. This movement also exists in fortuitous conjunctions of texture and material, by shoe touching shoe, in the viewer's eye movement from horizon to floor. Unified in their individuality, Pettus' shoes grunt, teeter, sashay, and dance across the gallery like the silhouetted immigrants in Carlos Saura's Tango. Nameless, faceless masses moving forward toward the audience, these travelers cross the space in pairs and alone, among friends and with families. Small groups merge with other small groups. Each silhouette is distinct, but the silhouettes move in unison across the gallery stage. The objects on the floor and the objects on teh wall converge. They pause, then stir. The shoes stop toward the horizon.

-- Laura Burns
Baltimore, November 2008

Laura Burns is an artist and educator who lives and works in Baltimore. She teaches photography at Goucher College.