The History of Pendragon year by year – 1994

This year saw us making our very first exhibition! Metamorphosis. The nature themed  pieces we created this year very much set the tone for our future work. At the centre of this exhibition  were the 5 sculptural shoes representing the stages of the life of the shoe. The first three were inspired by the life cycle of a caterpillar: pupa, chrysalis, adult butterfly,  then, slightly straying from caterpillars, the rather grim demise was fashioned after the appearance of Cicadas on tree trunks. This was the death of the shoe. Then, by absolute happenstance, Adrian stumbled upon a phoenix theme, so rather than succumb to mortality, we bookended the series with the arisen phoenix

Bankrolled by an Arts Queensland Grant, we had the luxury of being able to toy and experiment with the shoe as an art form, drawing out and focusing on organic shapes and forms. That playfulness of form and shape wasn’t purely aesthetic, we made technical breakthroughs with leather dying, embossing and moulding- as showcased by our “Prince of Autumn Leaves”, “metamorphosis 4, Drought  and “Shoes of the Gods”. We experimented with wood carving heels and draped them in exotic skins.

The pieces were performed at a beautiful inner-city ball room in Elizabeth Street Brisbane, choreographed by our dear friend Alex. Each pair of our creations was worn onstage with costumes and props (one memorable prop was a fully grown carpet snake wrangled by the lovely Tonia). We then toured it to Cairns for a display at the iconic Crackerbox Palace store.  (Which is still there!)

Metamorphosis has a twofold meaning for us: the embodiment of the nature theme, but also our evolution artistically and technically.

Other creations in this exhibition included the Harvest boots, Mermaid Shoes  Redback Spider shoes and Temptation.