Japanese geta sandals from www.allposters.com

Shoes are our connection to the earth. To walk in someone’s shoes is to understand what it’s like to be them. If you click the heels together they might take you home. According to cliché they induce spending frenzies beyond rationality in women. They can alter the way you walk and think about yourself. They are personal - Prince Charming knew the glass slipper could belong to one girl and it would fit only her feet. They are hard to buy for other people: not just because they’re the only thing that cannot be worn if not fitted properly, but because our attraction to them is often intensely subjective. They can ruin everything if they hurt. According to John Lock “Our incomes are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and to trip".

And the shoe that transcends national, cultural, class, gender and historical boundaries like no other? The thong. Last week I went to an interesting seminar called Thongs: From Function to High Fashion, by Lindie Ward of the Powerhouse Museum. She traced the thong through ancient Pakistani, Japanese, Indian, Egyptian, African and Burmese cultures, through to contemporary fashion.
She said there are an estimated six million rubber thongs floating in the earth’s oceans and that the left sides float right and the right sides float left: meaning on Australia’s east coast we end up with more right feet sides, and on the shores of NZ they have their left feet partners.

The oldest footwear artefact, found in Colorado, is said to date to 9000BC, and indeed had a strap between the toes. The Egyptians had inscriptions on the soles of thong-sandals: messages of love or phrases like ‘follow me’ that were imprinted in the sand with each step. An ancient Hindu thong she showed was elevated with ledges so as to cause as little harm as possible when walking on the ground, and had a lotus flower at the strap between the toes that opened up with each step, thanks to a lever beneath the soul.

Although plastic surgery on the feet is not uncommon today, Western Europeans didn’t show their toes until the 1930’s, and not in daywear until the 1950’s. Even then open shoes didn’t really enter the field of fashion until the 1960’s. In Australia the rubber thong became an icon representing freedom, egalitarianism, comfort and outdoor practicality, but was an anti-fashion statement for many and some restaurants and clubs today still have a ‘no thongs’ policy. Alan Davies even offered the following advice as a fool-proof plan for not getting a job: “in the event of an interview wear flip-flops.”

So they were very slowly adapted, but the thong has entered both high and mainstream fashion, not looking like it’s going away soon. Gucci is said to be one of the first to bring the thong to the catwalk and that Manolo Blahnik thing in the 1990’s saw the lavishly bejewelled stiletto thong a craved item for women worldwide. More recently, the Brazilian brand Havaianas introduced an inescapable uniform of brightly coloured rubber thongs. Western cultures realised how cheap and easy the three-point construction is to manufacture and in 2001 China allegedly produced 8 billion of them.

Here’s James’ lovely feet on a park bench in Paris. James doesn’t have any foot odour at all. It’s weird. But he’s lovely.



“For goodness' sake, I have flip-flops on. It's all right. Jesus wore sandals.”
(Ashley Smith)

Don’t let Penny Byrne near your mantelpiece of dusty porcelain figurines. Her first solo Sydney show Blood, Sweat and Fears is currently on at the Sullivan Strumpf gallery in Paddington, and her exploration (and disfiguration) of things kitsch, saccharine, and twee is not to be missed.

Trained in ceramics conservation, Melbourne-based Byrne, 41, says she won’t destroy important decorative art but the poor copies of the originals are “just asking for trouble." Her sculptures prick the conscience with their political content, dealing with issues such as human rights, war, political corruption, Japanese whaling, plastic surgery, US foreign policy, greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

Sourcing op-shops and eBay, Byrne uses twentieth-century Japanese mass-produced versions of decorative ornaments, and recontextualises them. Making use of her eye for possibility and her skills in ceramics, she transforms the cute, banal and farcical objects to give them meaning, humour and wit. Sweet curly haired boys, elegant ballerinas, and ceramic dolphins are made-over with weapons, army fatigues, gas masks and plenty of blood.

She clearly has a ball throughout the entire process, right up to naming her creations. The works displayed here are titled (from the top): "(Saint) Sebastian was feeling really Blue (Boy)", "Hiroshi and his Friends are Having a Whale of a Time #3", "APEX circa 1974", ""If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming" Mused Mother Earth" and "Its Murder on the Dance Floor #5".

Viewers are suckered in by the cuteness of the found objects and are prompted to laugh when they find what she has cheekily done with them. I am always intrigued by ideas of tastelessness and contextuality and enjoyed seeing her approach to the shock of the familiar, as opposed to the shock of the new.

Byrne still works conserving priceless ceramics and decorative arts for museums and galleries, but spends a lot of time op-shopping for objects to play with, and deconstructing them in her studio. She’s also trained as a lawyer and has retained a passion for human rights advocacy. Art gives her the opportunity to express herself in ways a lawyer is not necessarily able to do, she says.

Exhibition on until March 25

“Are you trying to make a statement?”
“It’s so black”
“How long are you going to leave it?”
“Why?”
“What is that?”
“But you’re pretty”
“Is it an experiment?”
“Cool”
“Let it grow to all its glory!”
“Are you a feminist?”
“Yuck”
“You’re becoming so French these days”

The responses to me growing my underarm hair have been surprisingly varied. What’s really surprising though is that so many people notice, and think it worth commenting on.

It’s hair that grows under the arms. I don’t know why, I remember asking why in sex-ed and getting an answer that was completely unrelated. But over the last century it has become required of women in many Western cultures to remove it. This advertisement appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1915, when sleeveless dresses were coming into vogue. Ideals of femininity were strongly rooted in Classical Greek and Roman depictions of goddesses, who had been hairless. Like little girls.

A new field of female vulnerability was opened up for marketers to exploit, and the safety razor was invented shortly after - today a massive global industry. At the moment I’m kind of over the endless battle with the hair of the underarm and our lingering vestige of Victorian prudery.

Apparently John Ruskin, the famous author/artist/critic, had been accustomed only to the hairless female nudes portrayed in art. Never having seen a naked woman before his wedding night, he was so appalled by the discovery of his wife's muff that he legally annulled the marriage, calling her freakish and deformed. Some say a likelier explanation of his rejection was that she was menstruating. Either way the guy was pretty out of touch, and it may not be entirely his fault. I think it’s outdated to still have such limited and stylised representations of the human form as we do in the media and arts. So let the fuzz grow. Or not. Whatever works for you really.

I am not bored. But if I were I would go to www.i-am-bored.com and find a link for a site about tampon crafts and then make lots of wonderful things out of tampons and write a blog about tampons and all the things you can make with them.