Part of Jan Jansen Shoe Treasures, Jan Jansen original shoes 1980’s.
Van der Werf had experimented with horsehair before. For ‘Jan Jansen Shoe Treasures’ she wanted to research this further. While working on Jansen’s shoes, she found that the leather became quite porous when she worked on it with needles so she decided she would leave the needles in. She had originally planned to remove them so she could pierce the holes with goat hair. The direct result of her sudden turnaround in approach is that her work now contains approximately 1500 needles. The needles were connected to the hairs and then painted in the same colour as the shoe, fusing the objects in the process. It is as if the shoes are slowly dissolving. It makes her think of a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly.
