Top Arts 2022 | Sebastian Durham

Designer sneaker (floral, silk) explores ideas of luxury and value. I have sampled a 1700’s pattern from Marie Antoinette’s fabric swatch book and applied it to a contemporary designer sneaker. This object references the form of a Gucci Flashtrek sneaker – a contemporary shoe designed by Alessandro Michele with an almost rococo sensibility in its decoration and exaggerated form – to bridge these two contexts (historical and contemporary). The work explores the relevance of art and fashion history to the contemporary luxury industry using Marie Antoinette, a figure of excess, as a symbol for impossible beauty. Designer sneaker (with crystals) (porcelain) looks at motifs and signifiers of luxury, using the medium of porcelain. The pattern samples the Blue Onion pattern from the18th century porcelain house Meissen, which is highly collectible and expensive. The work embodies the quality of beautiful uselessness in the fragility and immobility of ceramic – luxury in unblemished clay. This work also thinks about both the historical and current reliance of the Western luxury market on Asia with the pattern’s colonial sampling of Asian ceramics. In this way, this work looks at both contemporary and historical luxury contexts – blending them to create an inutile, beautiful object. Objects no. 2, 11, 7, 10, 3, 14, 20 speaks to ideas of form, deconstruction and reconstruction, assemblage, decay and erosion (burial and breaking, potential for breaking-delicacy), silhouette, l