Elisabeth Thorsen is a Norwegian shoemaker and artist living in Vardø!
She graduated from the Norwegian shoemaker school in 2008 and has been making art out of shoes ever since. She approaches her projects with a unique angle as she is making pieces of art, not merely functional footwear. Her shoes have an aesthetic expression, pleasing to the eye as well as challenging to fully grasp. She likes to craft her shoes experimenting with unusual material not commonly used for shoemaking. Recycled material such as furniture, pencils, carpets, drapes and other unusual material such as ice, sugar and sports tape has all been included in her work.
Her inspiration is from fairytales, nature, art and 70s movies. She also does performancesboth live and in video productions. Her previous work has been shown at:Kunsthalle Budapest, Kunsthaus Wien, Scloss Lichtenwalde (Germany) Krakow, Abu Dhabi, Oslo and Kuwait.
In 2017, Elisabeth Thorsen designed & launched her own exclusive and limited collection of goodyear welted shoes made in Portugal. Many of the shoes are made with hand-woven vintage carpets and vegetable tanned leather. The carpet shoes are unique items, no pair is completely the same. Some of the plain leather shoes are unique pieces where other artists have been invited
to decorate them. Elisabeth also wants to invite the buyer to do something special with the
shoes themselves.
Elisabeth is a part of the wonderful Virtual Shoe Museum & a proud member of The Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts (link to my page at NK)
Artists Webpage:
madebybetty.com