What if the next pair of shoes came out of the garden instead of a box?
Katerina Shukshina makes exactly that. Not shoes inspired by the garden, not shoes printed with a botanical motif. Actual dandelion seed heads gathered into something soft and cloud-pale, worn out in a meadow.
Pink gladiolus arranged into sculptural blooms around the foot. Pea shoots and curling tendrils wrapped like laces.
Wild strawberry leaves, fruit and flowers together, built into a sandal so delicate it looks like it would bruise if you looked at it too long.
The silhouette stays. Everything that normally makes a shoe a shoe gets replaced with whatever was growing nearby.
She sees the shoe inside the plant
Shukshina grew up in a small Russian village surrounded by gardens, fields and forest, foraging mushrooms and berries and playing with whatever she found. She studied history and taught it for seven years before turning to art full time. She has no formal art training.
What she has is an unusual eye for the moment a courgette stops reading as a vegetable and starts reading as a ballet flat, which is exactly the piece that first got the internet’s attention.
The work moves fast. She usually finishes a piece in a single day, often outdoors, usually with music or a podcast going. She doesn’t sketch.
I don’t draw sketches, I keep a picture in my head, because there is an element of unpredictability in working with natural materials.
Katerina Shukshina
Cabbage is her favorite material, for the variety of it, the way shape and texture and color shift leaf to leaf. She also works with moss, reeds, marsh algae, and whatever the vegetable garden is doing that week. Sewing, threading, gluing, taping. Nothing precious about the method. The plant leads and she follows, letting a stem decide where a strap wants to go.
They start disappearing immediately
Everything is fresh when she builds it, which means the shoes begin coming apart before the shoot is finished. Flowers wilt. Leaves curl and dry. Petals go translucent at the edges. A pair might exist intact for an hour.
So the photograph isn’t documentation of the artwork. It is the only version of the artwork that survives.
That’s the quiet weight underneath work this playful. Fashion produces mountains of objects engineered to outlast everyone who will ever wear them, most of them destined to sit in the ground for centuries. Shukshina makes a pair with a lifespan measured in hours and treats the wilting as part of the material rather than a failure of it. Moss & Fog has followed this thinking before, through organic footwear grown rather than manufactured and the long conversation between nature and shoe design. Few people have made the point this lightly.
Inspiration, as she puts it, is everywhere. In the wheat spikelets moving in the wind. In the sun on the surface of the water. Occasionally in a courgette.
All images by Katerina Shukshina, @shu_katerina. Via designboom, with additional quotes from the Garden Museum.
