When Shoelaces Grow Like Grass (6 pics)

Dominic Wilcox is an artist who loves a challenge. While others see everyday objects as boring and uninteresting, Wilcox sees art in the making. "The more dull the starting point the better," he tells us. "If someone gave me a rock and said 'do something creative with it' then I would be happy. I have a feeling that within everything there is some sort of magic waiting to be revealed."

One of his past projects, called Field, involved taking 700 eco-friendly shoes and turning their shoelaces into what looks like growing grass. This installation first debuted in September 2009 at Tom Dixon's group show in Ladbroke Grove, London. From there it went into a Milan gallery and finally to London's prestigious department store Selfridges in August 2010. Apparently, Selfridge thought it was the perfect installation to announce that they had opened the world's largest shoe department.

"It was quite time consuming and repetitive doing the same process to 700 shoes," Wilcox says when asked about the making of this project. "I had some assistants so that was great but I did find myself going a little crazy at times. The best part of making the field was arranging them within the space and bending the laces to become grass.

"I had very nice feedback from the public. Many people didn't recognize what they were looking at initially. They saw a field but took a while to see that the field was made of shoelaces. I like it when the work reveals itself in stages like that."






So how did this modern-day Houdini make these shoelaces come alive? The 2,100 shoelaces were help up by 1.3 kilometers of brass wire.

Dominic Wilcox's website