“Boots for Rising Waters” is the latest footwear Schwenk designed for the upcoming season of climate change. They are a stylish blue and black high-platformed-gumboot. The glossy black stacked soles of the “Boots” range in height from 10 to 30 cm, allowing the wearer to select a height appropriate for the days level of flooding. Helpers must assist the wearer of the shoes to walk. A sign that raises the question of whether only the wealthy can adapt to climate change?
“Boots for Rising Waters” premiered as a performance of a fashion show on the stairs of the Dom Cathedral in Cologne. In the performance, nine women (assisted by their helpers) modelled the “Boots” using the stairs as a fashion-runway and the everyday users of the public space as their audience. The participants precariously ascend the rising levels of the steps with decreasing mobility, to ultimately cluster at the doors of the cathedral, seated with their feet protectively drawn up against the tide.
This workwas adapted and performed at the Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin, NZ [2009] and at Artereal Gallery, Sydney, [2010].
“Boots for Rising Waters” with their exaggeratedly raised platforms are a humorous, baroque theatricalization of an issue of great seriousness. This work is part of a larger series about environmental concerns called, “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot”1
1 Joni Mitchell, “A big yellow taxi”, 1970