From September 11 to September 20, 2026, DalgArt presented the exhibition “In Her Shoes” by British artist Paula Chambers, curated by Valentin Boiangiu.
“In Her Shoes is an exhibition of sculptural works by UK artist Paula Chambers. Created from objects and materials sourced from flea markets and sites of second-hand exchange the works in this exhibition explore the subjective nuance and ultimate unknowability of the lives of others.
During a stay at DalgArt earlier this year Paula spent time exploring the village and surrounding countryside, visited the flea market in Craiova, was generously donated domestic items from a local family, and listened to the jackals in the evenings whilst thinking about the stories that objects hold.
The sculptural works in this exhibition are a material response to the imagined lives of women who remain unknown. These art works offer possible stories for the absent occupiers of house and home, women who led domestic lives both culturally rich and historically confining. The concrete fencing panels encountered around DalgArt have been transformed into softly draped curtains, a work that prompts questions about the stability of boundaries and the need to define personal space. Accompanying these curtain fence panels are a series of 3D printed jackal skulls, each of which grips between their teeth a small copper pot with descending miniature ladders made from sticks and yarn suggesting associations of domestic escape.
A glittering women’s headscarf crocheted from copper wire is both beautiful and potentially dangerous, stones painted pink hang in nylon net shopping bags referencing the heavy load of women’s domestic labour, stacked piles of fabric teeter precariously much like emotional familial bonds, an intimate and discreet film of the artist wearing the found shoes of a local woman is both poignant and a little uncanny, and a series of printed images of small copper ‘ladies’ figurines taken in Craiova and around DalgArt complete the exhibition.
In each of these art works feminine material culture has been transformed through hand-crafting processes to offer imaginative interpretations of the lives of absent and unknown women whose presence is materialised more powerfully through the sculptural objects exhibited here.” (curatorial text)
Paula Chambers is an academic and an artist researcher. She has exhibited widely nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions Strays and Stowaways at Artifex Gallery Vilnius, Now You See Her, Now You Don’t at Bury Sculpture Centre, Greater Manchester, and Not My Voice, Not My Hair at Stone Space Gallery in London. In June 2023 she undertook Material Nomads: a feral artist intervention for Momentum 12 in Moss, Norway, subsequently developed for sites in Lisbon, Warsaw and Riga.
Paula is Associate Professor on BA (Hons) Fine Art at Leeds Arts University. She has presented at national and international conferences on feminism, contemporary art and the domestic, and is co-editor of the book Feral Objects: Speculative Approaches to Animism in the Arts, and Wearable Objects and Curative Things: Material Approaches to the Intersections of Fashion, Art, Health and Medicine.
