Few things on this planet can compete with the shoe as an object of desire; it is the fetish item par excellence, stock in trade of the femme fatale, indelibly linked with excess and corruption (and 'fess up-how many of us, whilst tsk tsking at the extravagance, did not experience a secret twinge of envy at lmelda's outrageous shoe collection?). The deserving winners of this year's Hermanns Art Award, Julie Rrap (1st prize) and Prue Venables (2nd prize) were among the few entries that managed to transcend the Award's simple brief for shoe inspired art and comment on the absurdity of our slavery to the shoe. Venables's immaculately glazed porcelain slippers sit atop modest cardboard boxes in Memories of ldonia. This demure footwear almost suggests the comfortable slipper yet the imposed geometry and ceramic construction render it unwearable. The child-like dimensions also hint at foot binding practices; like Cinderella the chosen's 'model' servitude and humility are embodied in an impossibly cruel, yet beautiful, slipper. Julie Rrap's deliciously repellent Overstepping presents a Western scenario for foot binding, although cosmetic surgery is more likely to claim responsibility for grafting the human heel into a permanent stiletto. One is reminded of Venezuelan beauty pageants and supermodels- airbrushed, lipo-sucked and scalpelled into increasingly impossible paragons of thinness and beauty. Rrap puts the digital print, based as it is in photographic 'reality', to particularly effective use. Overstepping is both compelling and disturbing precisely because it might be possible; it looks real. The stiletto-archetypal fetish shoe-understandably dominates the Hermanns, but is celebrated most unashamedly by Sue Saxon. Her thigh-high, chain mail, stainless steel heeled and toed boots with matching suspender belt are easily the yummiest and