Kyrgyz Material Culture – Arts Council International Development Fund with TUMAR

Kyrgyz material culture was a project between Art Group Tumar and Liz Ciokajlo, facilitated by Liliya Serazetdinova funds granted by The British Council and Arts Council England Artist’s International Development Fund. The Aim of the Project… was to learn about traditional Kyrgyz nomadic material culture and to share UK approaches to footwear design. On the trip we explored and developed a new prototype…

Felt Shoes

The Felt Shoes are the foundation pieces in the Natural Selection collection. Made from 100% wool felt of high quality from Daimer Filze http://www.daimer-filze.com  , essentially felt tubes are moulded into and around 3D printed forms using millinery techniques. Binders are stratigically added to vary densities creating hollow heels and suspended foot beds. This reduces components and…

Cocolok Shoes

The Cocolok shoes were made of coconut, latex and Bioresin with a wool felt sock. The material was left exposed to go some way to show off it’s beauty. Coir from the company ENKEV is coco fibre collected from the coconut husk. It is transformed into sheets providing excellent ventilation. The sheets are sprayed with natural…

Flax Shoes

A non woven 100% Flax was explored. The material is produced by Norafin Industries in Germany. http://www.norafin.com and won an innovation award in 2011. It is light weight, tear-resistent durable, flexible, comfortable and easy to impregnate. Applications include public transportation/aviation, wind energy, wire & cable application, roll covers, body armour & ballistic protection, motorsports and yachting.  The material was…

BioCouture ‘Grown Shoe’

Part of what BespokeLab… does is contact designers, artist, scientist and engineers doing interesting work for collaborations. Near the end of working on the Natural Selection work, it became evident synthetic biology would offer some solutions to the material options for additive manufacturing. Suzanne Lee of BioCouture consults on bio materials for emerging technologies. Her…

Manchu Shoe

The Manchu shoe was made for Arena Page’s 2012 collection. Ten shoes were made and Arena’s collection was show at the London College of Fashion external MA show at the Victoria and Albert Museum London. The shoes were inspired but the strong Manchu women where foot binding was outlawed. These women wore platform under low…