Ellen Sampson

I am an artist, material culture researcher, and curator who uses practice-based research to explore the relationships between clothing and the body, in museums, archives, and everyday life. My research is concerned with recording and critically examining the marks of use, as powerful indexical traces, which have the potential to render the everyday auratic. Previous museum archival work has included producing the photographic series Interior at Minpaku Ethnographic Museum in Osaka and Wear and Trace a series of images exploring the presence of footprints in Northampton Museum (the world’s largest footwear collection).

My doctoral research explored wearers’ relationships with their shoes. It presented an alternative perspective, suggesting that attachment to footwear derives not simply from consumption, status or desire, but from the sustained tactile relationship that develops through wear. Drawing on anthropological and psychoanalytic perspectives on attachment, affect and the self, and utilising an auto-ethnographic methodology of writing, object, image and filmmaking, it sought to highlight the experience of wearing and the materiality of wornness, presenting shoes as records of lived experience. It highlighted the material traces of these relationships; the ways they are embodied within the artefacts themselves.