moves, moves not
When I move to other places ... will/leave bits of myself there too or will they all follow me.
Karen Sasella, '(leaving) Darwin'
Paperbark (Melaleuca) is a ubiquitous material in the Top End. lt is used by Aboriginal people to make shelters, watercraft, bedding, bandages and carrying containers for food and water. lt serves as tinder and tinfoil, to kinder fires and wrap food for cooking. At birth a baby is wrapped in paperbark and at death corpses are wrapped in it for burial. The Kungarakan people of the Finniss River region refer to themselves as paperbark people. However even they do not usually use paperbark for footwear, so Judith Durnford's decision to make one hundred and thirty-five pairs of paperbark shoes was an unprecedented and remarkable feat.
In her first solo exhibition, Moves, Moves Not, Durnford brought off a conceptual coup. In this work, she connects the memory, from her earlier time in Japan, of seeing the rows of empty shoes left outside Japanese houses and temples with the national passion for making carefully constructed containers and the artform of wrapping, again with an Indigenous Australian material that speaks quietly of the bush, in the form of the very motif of travelling-shoes.
Durnford knows the bush not as a botanist nor as an Indigenous person, but as an artist who sees colours, textures, shapes and new forms in an unlikely material for sculpture, let alone shoe making. Paperbark is of its nature friable, crumbling, falling off, falling apart, flaking, so to use it for shoes is either perverse, whimsical or inspired. The colour is absolutely right, pale pinky brown, like untanned leather creating at first