Only shoes can save us now!

Jo cope

11 November 2022 to 4 February 2023

Jo Cope is an artist, designer and lecturer brought up in Leicestershire. She works at the intersection of fashion, art, craft and performance and has worked as a fashion educator at De Montfort University and internationally. Cope has carved out a niche for herself as an artist focussing on our cultural relationship with shoes. She works with traditional shoe-making craft to create contemporary sculptural works and performances that inhabit a space between design and art practices. This exhibition at Leicester Gallery, De Montfort University is her largest to date and is a homecoming show after a decade of global exhibitions. Cope curates annual exhibitions for London Craft Week, one of which is the Shoes Have Names project a collaboration between Jo Cope and Shelter Boutique, which brought together ten previously homeless individuals with ten shoe designers. This is currently on show in Brussels at the House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture. Cope explores fashion’s wider role in art and society, including that of a tool for social activism. In 2021, she worked with the Graduate Fashion Foundation and Shelter Charity to set up the first ‘Fashion for Social Change’ Award entered annually by students across the UK. As well as being part of the Fashion Communications and Fashion Design team at De Montfort University she is a guest speaker at universities internationally including in Australia, Pakistan and Tel Aviv. Cope’s work has been exhibited in prestigious museums and galleries internationally including The Museum of Decorative Arts Paris as part of History of Shoes and Shoetopia at The Academy of Arts Budapest. Recent performance projects include The Feminist Rose at The Garden Museum London 2022 and Walking on Water at The Venice Design Biennale 2021.

Saviours come in many different shapes and sizes, mine’s shoes, what are yours? Jo Cope began working as a beauty therapist in Leicester before embarking on her journey as an artist and that early experience informs this current exhibition. She draws parallels to the care of her previous work and her current practice as an artist. In her years managing a beauty clinic in Leicester, she experienced feet from a more holistic standpoint and still often finds similarity between massaging feet and massaging leather on wooden foot lasts. Alongside the physical similarities between treating feet and leather she considers her shoes to be ‘a form of therapeutic vessel’. Cope has a multifaceted practice of communicaing through many different mediums including craft, film, performance, photography and installation. Her multidisciplinary practice has allowed her to follow a collaborative approach. This has seen her working across dance, choreography, visual art, writing and fashion. Through her work, she investigates and plays with the visual language of shoes, the cultural significance of feet and walking anthropologies. Cope’s shoes are visual metaphors, a tool used within art and cognitive therapies. She believes that in exploring issues around ‘The Self’, much like in counselling and psychological therapies, the metaphor enables space to process the subjects raised from a comfortable distance which can allow for self-reflection. Shoemaking is rooted in her family and works here interweave layers of her familial history referring to her maternal grandparents who worked in the shoe industry, and the iconography of the Church draws on her father’s work as a preacher. Cope’s maternal grandparents worked in the Leicestershire village of Sileby where her grandfather was a cobbler. In an act of generosity within the community, he resoled the shoes of children from poorer families in the village neighbourhood for free. Her grandmother was a heel coverer most of her life, and Jo’s mother often comments “shoes allowed us to eat”. Throughout Jo’s work there is an exploration of the intersection between industrial labour and artistic production. Her artwork is labour intensive creating sculptural artworks crafted to exacting standards employing the skills of the shoe industry. There is a sense within Cope’s work that the labour of the artist can be cathartic and healing both for the artist and the audience. As an artist Cope aims to care for and nurture her audiences. Her approach is still that of the beauty therapist, understanding that her practice as an artist is there to console, heal and provide solace for both herself and the audiences who engage with it. For this exhibition, Jo Cope remixes new pieces with past projects which include: The Global Footprint commissioned by Northampton Boot and Shoe Museum 2013, The Opposite of Addiction footwear artefacts for London College of Fashion x Sadler’s Wells Material Movement Gala 2017 and The Feminist Rose, created for London Craft Week at The Garden Museum 2022.