Story
After more than 60 years of work as certified orthopaedic shoemaker, my uncle has hang up his job on the nail.
During the dissolution of his workshop we were faced with a lot of shoe lasts of his former customers.
The shoe lasts have lived their first lives and have been used continuously for years to produce new shoes on them.
When you turn the shoe last and you can see many small holes you know they have been in use very often. The more holes they have, the more shoes have been made over the years.
What should happen to them now?
My vision
What to do with a number of shoe lasts but not only to burn them?
The idea to use them only for heat recovery hurt my soul and heart because in each of them there was a lot of work and decades of life.
I just started to think out of the shoe box to get an idea what to make out of them. I looked at a lot of pictures...
... and then, bit by bit an idea emerged and took form giving space to my creativity and my craftsmanship.
My motivation
For many years I have been giving old things a second or even a third life. It is hard for me to part with old things. Therefore I like to call myself the preserver.
So I give a second life to these shoe lasts, where really no one looks like the other, not even the right one like the left one.
I look at each one of them and transform them in the most different way to their new life or task. They are brought to a new shine through many steps of work. For example, each object gets a branding seal and its own number stamped on it.
Their journey has just started and many more things are bound to happen.
My story
There are things in life that suddenly appear and then take their place as if it had always been that way. It was the same with me.
A door had just closed and then another door opened in a place where I had not expected at all.
I admit that in the past two decades, due to my job, my creativity had been hiding far in the back.
Without a complete reorientation in my life, there would have been no room for it.
And now it has rolled over me like a big wave and simply swept me away. Who knows where the journey will end.
I have now been asked several times at the markets on the name "Holzgiesserei", according to the motto, you can not cast wood. It's more a play on words, since I also work with metals. There will be other works of art and projects for the future,too.
