FIGURE 25

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Oil bar, oil paint, and charcoal pencil on paper

VOIDS, MATTER, SHADOWS

ALEXANDRA KISS

Architecture has given me an insatiable curiosity to explore and understand the sectional nature of inhabited space, and a desire to investigate the imprints our bodies leave in the spaces they occupy. This series of drawings began with frustrated attempts at seeing and drawing the space gathered and enclosed by old worn-out shoes that I had begun to collect. With the passing of time, shoes accumulate fundamental traces of our bodies—our weight imprints in their lining and soles, our way of walking deforms them in a unique manner, and the characteristic shapes of our feet press into them. These objects are portraits of their owners, lending an initially inanimate mass-produced object an animate existence. Sectioning the shoes was the method used to investigate and discover their inner space, to encounter the human trace. The shadows give them a trace of their own as the interstice between their matter, the external light, and their spatial context. The act of drawing articulates their distinct and separate existence, in the same way that the dweller impresses himself into the space he occupies and leaves behind a space that will be forever changed by what has come to pass through it.