July 2021 – Pendragon Shoes

July 30, 2021July 30, 2021

History of Pendragon year by year – 2000

The turn of the century started with a bang at Woodford Folk Festival where we usually spend our New Years having a Pendragon Shoes stall. We started making a summer range – up until now we’d largely made boots and shoes, with just a few sandals thrown in for good measure. Crazy really, considering we live in Queensland where you hardly even get to wear boots for more than a month a year because of the warm weather. We made groovy slides with a distinctly spacey theme as well as the Elemental Collection – very much inspired by nature.
The slides featured a skew shaped sole and wide panel on top which was decorated with either a star, a spiral or a spaceship! Lots of fun and very colourful.
The Elemental Collection, inspired by elemental forces in nature, combined texture and colour.
Art nouveau was our muse for the collection, with the movement’s distinct organic aesthetic trickling through the soles and shapes of the shoes. Elemental designs included: Dragonfly nouveau sandals and butterfly sandals (air), fish thongs (water) and the gum leaf sandals and forest leaf sandals (earth).

We still make versions of these today. See the summer page.

Elemental collection – Forest Leaf sandals

July 20, 2021

History of Pendragon year by year – 1999

After the success of our art shoe exhibition in Brisbane in 1998, we were flown to Germany by Novel (same company we did the exhibition for the previous year). In Munich we exhibited lots of art shoes in an exhibition called Art in Shoes in Novel’s offices and adjoining gallery .

Pendragon shoe exhibition — Adrian cataloguing the shoe exhibits

We were also commissioned by sponsors of the exhibition, MCM (yes that fancy luggage company) to create 2 pieces of “shoe art” in their iconic MCM material.

There was a few German newspaper articles and a photo in German vogue. One of the iconic pieces from this exhibition was the Y2K bug shoes. For those who weren’t alive in 1999, on the eve of the change of the century, there was a fear that computers would all go crazy and it was referred to as the Y2K bug. These art boots depict nature taking back over the crashed computer like a crashed cargo plane found in the jungle, reclaimed by the vines and trees. These are the inspiration for many of our designs since then, including the Steampunk Leaf boots.

Also from that exhibition were the fish shoes, eye vine boots, acid jazz, frog princess, and pink skew shoes (photographed for German Vogue) We got to travel a bit around Europe afterwards. We took the frog princess with us and photographed her everywhere, including Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

July 19, 2021

History of Pendragon year by year – 1998

1998 was a big year for us. We decided to close our workshop/studio above Elizabeth Arcade in Brisbane and move back to work from Adrian’s house. It was great for 5 years, but we were exhausted from pretty much just working to pay bills. The final straw came when we were commissioned to make a series of acrobat shoes for a troupe of European performers. They all went beautifully…no photos unfortunately. But even more memorable was the fact we got robbed the night they paid us. Someone managed to climb up a drainpipe several flights up, break in through a window and steal all of the money. Always suspected those acrobats! 😉

As the saying goes, as soon as one door closes another one opens. We were asked by a Brisbane Podiatrist to make an exhibition of art shoes for a visiting computer software company from Germany called Novel. They were coming to Brisbane for their international conference and he was in charge of finding some interesting entertainment while the delegates were in town. It was the beginning of a long friendship with our dear friend Brian. Our display was to be part of that. Novel make software that measures pressure and is applied in the shoe and podiatry industry.

We were commissioned to make a branded art shoe for them. Elke made the pictured resin shoe sculpture which showed the coloured pressure technology in art form.

We created a dragon shoe collection and the first owl shoes. They were displayed at the Ridges Hotel in South Bank, Brisbane.