By Emmet Byrne

Jan 11, 2021

Walker Publishing Filed to Design · Part of Designs For Different Futures

Closeup of sneakers created by Helen Kirkum for the Designs for Different Futures exhibition, 2019

As part of the Walker's presentation of Designs for Different Futures (on view now—or at least when the museum reopens), we will be publishing a number of texts from the exhibition catalogue (Yale University Press, December 2019), exploring the ways in which designers create, critique, and question possible futures, big and small. The exhibition was organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

This conversation took place by Skype on January 11, 2019, with Helen Kirkum at home in London and exhibition co-curator Emmet Byrne at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Emmet Byrne (EB)

What do you do and why does it matter to you?

Helen Kirkum (HK)

I studied footwear for six years, got a BA and an MA in footwear design. I’d previously learned how to make a traditional shoe, like a brogue, a men’s shoe, in Northampton, a real traditional-footwear town. When I went to the Royal College of Art [London], I started thinking about how to unmake a shoe, or how to look at construction methods in a different way. I started looking into issues of recycling and obsolescence and how people interact with their products, especially sneakers, because I think sneakers are so trend driven. I started visiting recycling centers and I noticed that the hauls of sneakers that were there, there wasn’t really anything wrong with them. They were just outdated or had been outgrown. When I realized the mass of stuff in these warehouses, my mindset changed, and I was like, How can I make products out of new materials, when there are so many raw materials out there and still in such good condition? So I started taking old sneakers from recycling centers, cutting them up, and putting them back together again.

There are so many different facets to the process. But the main thing was taking this idea of the stories of the sneakers and how they’re made in the first place—how they developed through their life, their end of life, and how they can be used again. I really like to show as many processes as possible. With the shoes, I deconstruct everything by unpicking all the component shapes so that the shapes in the end are the shapes that were originally designed by the first person that designed that first shoe, but they’ve been affected by the life that they’ve already lived. And then they’ve been taken apart by me, and then they’ve been reconstructed in a new way. But it shows the process all the way through.

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That’s what I do basically: take shoes apart, put them back together again. I am really interested in making products from recycled materials that people would look at and want because they look cool, they look different. And then the material story is a secondary story in a way. Because kids are so much about the trends and the hype. How can I create something that people want first, and then invest in because of the story? That was the challenge, and that’s what I’m trying to do.

EB

You’ve described the process of creating these shoes as collage-making. What are you collaging?

HK

Yeah, a few different ideas play into this. When I take the shoes from the recycling centers, they already have so many memories and so much emotion embedded in them. Taking them apart is a therapeutic process. Deconstructing them and putting them back together is almost like making a puzzle. The way I build the shoes, everything is zigzag-stitched together, it’s all butted together. I try as much as I can to make all the pieces so they don’t overlap. So then the logos just become shapes that are useful. If a piece fits somewhere, it’s because it fits in the puzzle where I need it. Sometimes I can have half done and then I have to wait because I can’t find the exact piece to go somewhere. It’s like making a painting, a lot of layers and a lot of time spent understanding how the pieces are going to fit together. 

It’s a physical act of collaging the shapes together; it’s also about combining the stories of the people, the histories of the wearers but also the factory workers who put the shoe together, and before that, the designers who designed the shoe. Keeping the exact shape of a piece is like paying homage to the designer. And keeping the remnants of a stitch or stitch mark is paying homage to the factory workers. And then the texture of the material is paying homage to the person who wore them. And then all of that is embedded into this new product that’s full of emotions and stories. The shoes are fossils of people’s lives.

EB

It feels like a lot of times when new products come out, they want to be devoid of those stories, in service of the brand’s overriding story. They want to be so pristine that you’re filled with some desire for this very, very new thing. 

HK

Yeah. I think especially with sneakers, they’re so, like you said, devoid of any personality almost. When they appear on the shelf, they’re so white and shiny, and perfectly glued together. They try to have as little trace of any interference from one pair to the next. All the leather is carefully chosen so that there are no defects. And everything is made so it’s pristine, and you can’t tell one apart from the other. In a way, I’m trying to do the complete opposite of that. How can we interact with sneaker culture in a way that is a bit dirty and a bit messy when sneakerheads and sneaker collectors are known for keeping their shoes so perfect? 

EB

Do you see a relationship between how we understand our possessions and our larger understanding of time? Do concepts like product life cycles, planned obsolescence, and sustainability affect how we perceive time as a whole?

HK

I think that’s a really interesting question. My initial response is that we don’t understand the process of making things anymore. People frequently look at objects and ask if they are handmade. Actually all shoes are pretty much handmade. There might be a few machines that attach some glue on the bottom, but most shoes are made by people who are experts in their individual parts of the process. But it takes years of practice for workers to get to a place where they can do it quickly. So yeah, I think that maybe if people understood more about how their products are made, then they would respect them in a different way.

With couture brands, people pay attention to the labor and craft, and they form a different relationship with a thing. But things that are mass produced, like a phone—if it breaks you get another one. You don’t realize all the processes that have gone into creating it. I definitely think this affects us in a negative way. But I also think people are now craving a better understanding of things. They are looking for real connections. 

I think, in a way, that’s why my work resonates with people, because it’s easy to understand. It’s very tactile. You can see the stitch that stitches two pieces together. You can recognize the piece of another shoe.

EB

So the more that people understand the reality of their possessions, the more they can understand how the world around them works. When they receive objects that are pristine and mass produced, there’s no hint of the reality behind them, like it’s trying to just be as faceless as possible, and that allows people to be able to discard things very quickly. They don’t have to think about what they surround themselves with, because the object is not encouraging them to think about it. Therefore they can think in very short time frames.

HK

I think brands are starting to realize that people are craving more of a connection with their products. I think a connection helps you understand the object in terms of the time that went into it, all the way from when the first person picked up their pencil to start designing the product. It’s kind of like when you grow a plant. I was just looking at mine—I’m trying to grow an avocado. It has been in its jar for about five months, and it’s grown three inches. And when you’re trying to nurture something and grow it, you understand time in a different way. And I was thinking, I might get an avocado this year. And then I Googled it, and it takes ten years to grow an avocado tree before it flowers. And I was like, damn. It makes you respect things in a different way. When I see an avocado now in a supermarket, I think about how someone had to grow that tree for ten years before it even had a chance of growing an avocado.

EB

That is such a lovely thought. I don’t hear words like nourishing and nurturing in the context of design that often. The more you can understand how something works, and spend time with it, the more you respect it, and the more you can try to nurture it into the future, and that just gives you a different way of understanding your relationship to objects and to time.

HK

And I think it’s also giving some ownership back to consumers in a way. Think about when we had our first phones, back in the nineties. If the battery died, you could just take it apart and replace the battery and put new bits in and it would work fine. But now with most smartphones, you can’t do that. And I think it’s the same with our sneakers in a way. With a traditional brogue, you can get it resoled when the sole wears down, and keep wearing it. But you can’t do that with a sneaker. So it’s like giving people some ownership of the things they buy, to say, “If you look after this and you respect this, this is going to have a longevity and it’s going to be with you for a longer time.”

And I think that’s what people need. People are inspired by what I’m doing because it gives them back ownership to say, “OK, I’m going to take my shoes off. And I’m going to, I don’t know, draw swirls all over them or whatever, because they didn’t have a pair at the store with swirls on them, and that’s what I want, so I’m going to just do it myself.” And I think when people start feeling like that, then that’s when the power is going to switch back to us.

EB

To the people.

HK

To the people. ▪︎    

HELEN KIRKUM graduated from the Royal College of Art, London, in July 2016 with a master’s in footwear. That same year she exhibited her graduate collection at International Talent Support, where she won both the accessories award and the Vogue Talents award. Kirkum designs sneakers from parts of used and discarded shoes, conceptualizing connections with commerce and materiality through textures, graphics, and silhouettes.

EMMET BYRNE is the design director and associate curator of design at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He provides creative leadership for the Walker in all areas of visual communication, branding, and publishing, while overseeing the award-winning in-house design studio. He is the editor of the Gradient and is the creator of the Walker’s Intangibles platform.

The catalogue was produced by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with design by the Walker Art Center. It was edited and conceived by the exhibition’s curators: Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design, Walker Art Center; Kathryn B. Hiesinger, The J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator and Michelle Millar Fisher, formerly The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator in the department of European Decorative Arts after 1700, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Zoë Ryan, formerly the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Text and compilation © 2019 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and The Art Institute of Chicago