In my father's family there is a long history of having flat feet. Almost every single person in that family demonstrates this trait and has suffered from having flat feet in one way or another, going back many generations. Some of the male members of the family suffered such severe consequences for not having an arch in their feet at all, that they were exempt from compulsory army service. For most, their feet got very painful and although many were very active in sports, they became tired very quickly, especially after running and jumping or after prolonged walking. Female members of the family were unable to wear high heels or completely flat shoes, like sandals, and as a result always posed in a very funny way in the old black and white photographs, leaning sideways, backwards or forwards, supported by or clinging on to someone else, while their feet remained completely out of shot, hidden in an unnatural angle behind someone else's dress or trousered legs.
The treatment for flat feet varied enormously through the years, from doing absolutely nothing, to being advised on what shoes to wear, to wearing metal foot braces. My father had to wear metal insoles on his specially made boots for all of his childhood and adolescence. I remember when I was taken to be tested to determine how severe my flat-footedness was, I was made to step into a special ink pad and then to walk on a long piece of rice paper so that the doctor could see how much of an arch there was. There was hardly any and my footprints were not immediately recognisable as the ones you normally see on the sand on a beach made by people, but were more like long egg-shaped ones, with five round toes, that might have belonged to an oversize baby-toy. I also remember one of the doctors saying that the best thing I could do was to walk barefoot in the summer on pebbles.
Determined not to wear metal braces or metal insoles, I walked barefoot on small gravel-size pebbles, on sand and on scorching hot big pebbles every summer for days on end and resisted wearing the fashionable sandals of transparent plastic that everyone else had and which allowed you to walk in and out of the sea undisturbed by the pebbles on your feet. I remember that it was really uncomfortable and at times painful to walk on pebbles like that, as they turned and changed position so that you lost your balance as you tried to lift one foot after the other. By the end of the summer I had feet soles that were so resistant to heat and pain that I think I could have walked on hot coals. I also did wear insoles in special boots in the winter (not metal ones though, but leather ones instead), so I cannot be sure which of these things did the trick, but I started developing an arch on my feet so that I had a nice, recognisable on the sand arch, by the age of seventeen.
Aretousa also has flat feet and I was soon to find out that the treatment for flat feet has moved on again. There is a longer wait recommended for a child who demonstrates flat feet to develop arches naturally, so nothing much is done before the age of five. Meanwhile, shoes with a small leather arch are recommended and boots with laces are also supposed to be beneficial. The children are encouraged to walk on tip-toes and to do other exercises, like picking up a pencil with their toes. One of the podiatrists told me that the best exercise for her is to walk barefoot on pebbles. That advice obviously has remained the same and is valued in at least two different countries, so as it possibly helped me, and definitely did not harm me in any way, I thought that I should make use of it for Aretousa in some way.
Of course, the ideal way to be exercising the soles of the feet with pebbles would be by walking on a real beach. Even more ideally if one was to do that without really realising they were doing it, so through casual walks along the beach or while playing. Preferably the beach would include different kinds of pebbles, so that you could walk on sand, wet and dry, smaller pebbles and gravel-size pebbles, as well as the large ones, as all of these would require different movements by the feet in order for the body to balance properly and retain the walking motion; in theory different kinds of pebbles would exercise different muscles. Also walking in shallow water would provide additional resistance. This image of kids playing on the beach (now detached from its original purpose to exercise the soles of flat feet), came to me very fast and alive and reminded me of the last summer, when Aretousa and myself spent most of our days by the sea. The prospect that this summer this experience might not happen was almost unbearable to me to contemplate and I felt such a longing for the sea (and for the beach in its capacity to lead to the sea), that if I closed my eyes I could hear and smell it as if I was just a breath away from it.
I am unable to say whether my real motivation was to create a way for Aretousa to exercise her feet, or if I urgently needed something to touch and feel that was sea-related, but in any case I created three panels containing three different textures in them: sand, gravel-size pebbles and large pebbles. For practical reasons these are contained within trays so that they don't escape everywhere in the house, and so that the walls of the trays provide resistance when walking on and so that I did not need to get large quantities of each material. I have seen different equipment used for children during physiotherapy to help them with muscle tone, movement control and balance and often these are created to resemble play-tracks/courses with elements such as stepping stones, tunnels, rings, step ladders, balance bars, wobbly plastic cushions, air-filled elements and inflated balls, all for walking on, stepping on and off, jumping, balancing, standing or sitting on. The fact that two of the trays I have used (the trays are from window sill pots) are narrow and long, makes the walking on them harder, as you have to deal with staying within the narrow tray as you put one foot in front of the other, while also trying to balance on the sand and small pebbles as they move below your feet. The third tray is a wooden one, as something stronger was required in order to contain the large, heavy pebbles. On this one you need to step on it and make small steps to rotate your body on the spot and then step off it again.
These exercises proved much harder than I had first thought, and Aretousa was very excited to try them out. The hardest ones were the sand one and the one with the large pebbles. Of course after the exercises are finished, she also wants to play with each material, so that by the end of the session I often lose some of the sand and smaller pebbles. One evening I forgot the three trays on the living room floor and saw them first thing in the morning when I was still not properly awake. I found them so depressing, lying there on the laminate floor, completely out of place, bits of something else detached from its whole, cut out as if with scissors into rectangular shapes and arranged in a line, not leading to the sea at all, but to a tall window pointing at an iconic cityscape of a foreign capital. Suspended on the top of a tower, miles away from my beloved sea I looked at the blue city below and I felt tears running at the back of my eyes and thought of how much I had missed the sea and what I wouldn't give to just feel it for a second, for a long blink of my heavy, longing eyes.
But as cut out as I might have felt myself at that point and completely misplaced, so it appears did my work. Not doing it at all would initially disguise itself as a relief and a gain of extra time, but soon would lead to restlessness, irritation and a feeling of utter futility shouldering madness. Trying to fit it in, time and money wise and physically in the given space, could very well work out just fine one time and then lead to a disastrous sequence of events affecting everyone, the next. Anyway, what place does a work of art which is made on a tower and stays there have in the world? Is it not as detached from its supposed external audience as those pebbled trays are from the sea? And is it worth all the desperate, inevitable, soul retching effort to fit it in, when it will be either packed up, bubble wrapped or hidden before it is seen by a dozen eyes? The conclusion is, that if it is still impossible for me not to do it, then it has to be done, even if its purpose is undefinable and its definition blurry.
For some time now I have been collecting empty chocolate trays with the intention of casting them in a mixture of sand, cement and plaster to create a wall panel. I have always been very intrigued by the design and shape of goods' packaging, including boxes, trays and protective material and by what negative spaces or new shapes they can create once discarded and what new "life" they can take on. Once I had found the time to cast the trays and they were set, I placed them on the floor in different arrangements till I came to a combination that I liked. The idea was to fix them onto a panel which would then be able to hang from the wall. While the panels were still on the floor unfixed, Aretousa took off her socks and started walking on them saying that she was doing her exercises. Then I heard the improbable phrase coming out of my mouth "No, that is mummy's art, it's not for flat feet! get off!". I could not quite believe what I had said and justified it in my head by thinking that since these cast shapes were solid and not able to move around like pebbles, they surely were not as good an exercise for flat feet as the three trays that I had made originally containing sand, gravel-size pebbles and large pebbles. I quickly retrieved them for her and we resumed the exercises there. But in real terms how is this panel of solid empty chocolate tray casts more useful in the world: hung on the wall in a tower for the aesthetic pleasure of a dozen eyes or used by a child to improve their foot arches? And the conclusion to that would have probably been to be used for flat foot exercises, but since the trays with pebbles and sand were designed specifically for this purpose, the panel is allowed to hang on the wall. Or be put in storage in due course, most certainly.
And so I have found myself to be missing my work, as I am thinking and imagining it to be, as I have been found to be missing and thinking of the sea, and the reality of both has become small fragments and pieces designed to keep me sane while they have slowly crept and taken on a strange life of their own, steadily claiming their place in my day to day life, catching me completely oblivious to their rooting aspirations, so that I am starting to dread that I will be thinking of them when I am on a boat, on a breezy day on the blue sea, one evening.
The treatment for flat feet varied enormously through the years, from doing absolutely nothing, to being advised on what shoes to wear, to wearing metal foot braces. My father had to wear metal insoles on his specially made boots for all of his childhood and adolescence. I remember when I was taken to be tested to determine how severe my flat-footedness was, I was made to step into a special ink pad and then to walk on a long piece of rice paper so that the doctor could see how much of an arch there was. There was hardly any and my footprints were not immediately recognisable as the ones you normally see on the sand on a beach made by people, but were more like long egg-shaped ones, with five round toes, that might have belonged to an oversize baby-toy. I also remember one of the doctors saying that the best thing I could do was to walk barefoot in the summer on pebbles.
Determined not to wear metal braces or metal insoles, I walked barefoot on small gravel-size pebbles, on sand and on scorching hot big pebbles every summer for days on end and resisted wearing the fashionable sandals of transparent plastic that everyone else had and which allowed you to walk in and out of the sea undisturbed by the pebbles on your feet. I remember that it was really uncomfortable and at times painful to walk on pebbles like that, as they turned and changed position so that you lost your balance as you tried to lift one foot after the other. By the end of the summer I had feet soles that were so resistant to heat and pain that I think I could have walked on hot coals. I also did wear insoles in special boots in the winter (not metal ones though, but leather ones instead), so I cannot be sure which of these things did the trick, but I started developing an arch on my feet so that I had a nice, recognisable on the sand arch, by the age of seventeen.
Aretousa also has flat feet and I was soon to find out that the treatment for flat feet has moved on again. There is a longer wait recommended for a child who demonstrates flat feet to develop arches naturally, so nothing much is done before the age of five. Meanwhile, shoes with a small leather arch are recommended and boots with laces are also supposed to be beneficial. The children are encouraged to walk on tip-toes and to do other exercises, like picking up a pencil with their toes. One of the podiatrists told me that the best exercise for her is to walk barefoot on pebbles. That advice obviously has remained the same and is valued in at least two different countries, so as it possibly helped me, and definitely did not harm me in any way, I thought that I should make use of it for Aretousa in some way.
Of course, the ideal way to be exercising the soles of the feet with pebbles would be by walking on a real beach. Even more ideally if one was to do that without really realising they were doing it, so through casual walks along the beach or while playing. Preferably the beach would include different kinds of pebbles, so that you could walk on sand, wet and dry, smaller pebbles and gravel-size pebbles, as well as the large ones, as all of these would require different movements by the feet in order for the body to balance properly and retain the walking motion; in theory different kinds of pebbles would exercise different muscles. Also walking in shallow water would provide additional resistance. This image of kids playing on the beach (now detached from its original purpose to exercise the soles of flat feet), came to me very fast and alive and reminded me of the last summer, when Aretousa and myself spent most of our days by the sea. The prospect that this summer this experience might not happen was almost unbearable to me to contemplate and I felt such a longing for the sea (and for the beach in its capacity to lead to the sea), that if I closed my eyes I could hear and smell it as if I was just a breath away from it.
I am unable to say whether my real motivation was to create a way for Aretousa to exercise her feet, or if I urgently needed something to touch and feel that was sea-related, but in any case I created three panels containing three different textures in them: sand, gravel-size pebbles and large pebbles. For practical reasons these are contained within trays so that they don't escape everywhere in the house, and so that the walls of the trays provide resistance when walking on and so that I did not need to get large quantities of each material. I have seen different equipment used for children during physiotherapy to help them with muscle tone, movement control and balance and often these are created to resemble play-tracks/courses with elements such as stepping stones, tunnels, rings, step ladders, balance bars, wobbly plastic cushions, air-filled elements and inflated balls, all for walking on, stepping on and off, jumping, balancing, standing or sitting on. The fact that two of the trays I have used (the trays are from window sill pots) are narrow and long, makes the walking on them harder, as you have to deal with staying within the narrow tray as you put one foot in front of the other, while also trying to balance on the sand and small pebbles as they move below your feet. The third tray is a wooden one, as something stronger was required in order to contain the large, heavy pebbles. On this one you need to step on it and make small steps to rotate your body on the spot and then step off it again.
These exercises proved much harder than I had first thought, and Aretousa was very excited to try them out. The hardest ones were the sand one and the one with the large pebbles. Of course after the exercises are finished, she also wants to play with each material, so that by the end of the session I often lose some of the sand and smaller pebbles. One evening I forgot the three trays on the living room floor and saw them first thing in the morning when I was still not properly awake. I found them so depressing, lying there on the laminate floor, completely out of place, bits of something else detached from its whole, cut out as if with scissors into rectangular shapes and arranged in a line, not leading to the sea at all, but to a tall window pointing at an iconic cityscape of a foreign capital. Suspended on the top of a tower, miles away from my beloved sea I looked at the blue city below and I felt tears running at the back of my eyes and thought of how much I had missed the sea and what I wouldn't give to just feel it for a second, for a long blink of my heavy, longing eyes.
But as cut out as I might have felt myself at that point and completely misplaced, so it appears did my work. Not doing it at all would initially disguise itself as a relief and a gain of extra time, but soon would lead to restlessness, irritation and a feeling of utter futility shouldering madness. Trying to fit it in, time and money wise and physically in the given space, could very well work out just fine one time and then lead to a disastrous sequence of events affecting everyone, the next. Anyway, what place does a work of art which is made on a tower and stays there have in the world? Is it not as detached from its supposed external audience as those pebbled trays are from the sea? And is it worth all the desperate, inevitable, soul retching effort to fit it in, when it will be either packed up, bubble wrapped or hidden before it is seen by a dozen eyes? The conclusion is, that if it is still impossible for me not to do it, then it has to be done, even if its purpose is undefinable and its definition blurry.
For some time now I have been collecting empty chocolate trays with the intention of casting them in a mixture of sand, cement and plaster to create a wall panel. I have always been very intrigued by the design and shape of goods' packaging, including boxes, trays and protective material and by what negative spaces or new shapes they can create once discarded and what new "life" they can take on. Once I had found the time to cast the trays and they were set, I placed them on the floor in different arrangements till I came to a combination that I liked. The idea was to fix them onto a panel which would then be able to hang from the wall. While the panels were still on the floor unfixed, Aretousa took off her socks and started walking on them saying that she was doing her exercises. Then I heard the improbable phrase coming out of my mouth "No, that is mummy's art, it's not for flat feet! get off!". I could not quite believe what I had said and justified it in my head by thinking that since these cast shapes were solid and not able to move around like pebbles, they surely were not as good an exercise for flat feet as the three trays that I had made originally containing sand, gravel-size pebbles and large pebbles. I quickly retrieved them for her and we resumed the exercises there. But in real terms how is this panel of solid empty chocolate tray casts more useful in the world: hung on the wall in a tower for the aesthetic pleasure of a dozen eyes or used by a child to improve their foot arches? And the conclusion to that would have probably been to be used for flat foot exercises, but since the trays with pebbles and sand were designed specifically for this purpose, the panel is allowed to hang on the wall. Or be put in storage in due course, most certainly.
And so I have found myself to be missing my work, as I am thinking and imagining it to be, as I have been found to be missing and thinking of the sea, and the reality of both has become small fragments and pieces designed to keep me sane while they have slowly crept and taken on a strange life of their own, steadily claiming their place in my day to day life, catching me completely oblivious to their rooting aspirations, so that I am starting to dread that I will be thinking of them when I am on a boat, on a breezy day on the blue sea, one evening.
