The Voice of a Shoe

The Voice of a Shoe takes a household object and grants it the suggestion of speech, a surrealist gesture consistent with the animated domestic items that recur across Ando's interiors. The print likely isolates a single shoe — a small Edwardian-style boot or slipper, the kind worn by the solitary girl figures in her wider work — within a shallow ground, possibly accompanied by an attendant creature or symbol. Etched line carries the precise ornament and stitching of the shoe, a degree of decorative detail her intaglio practice favours, while aquatint supplies surrounding tone and chine collé permits localised colour or pattern to be set into the image. Subsequent hand colouring adjusts the palette impression by impression. The conceit — that an object has a voice — places the work within Ando's broader debt to European surrealism and to the macabre humour of nineteenth-century European print traditions, where the ordinary is displaced just enough to become uncertain. It is characteristic of her smaller, single-object compositions.