Eelko Moorer is Course Leader for MA Footwear at London College Fashion, independent practice-based researcher, and an artist-designer with his own studio practice crafting ideas into artefacts.
His work investigates the interplay between the (trans-) personal experience, methodologies and processes of making, and their relations to the meanings that these designed objects evoke and invoke.
What do the viewer and user experience? What are the emotional energies stimulated by and projected onto objects when they are opened up to more than one interpretation? The resulting ambiguity, or in-between spaces, by being both essence and ‘other’ open-up possibilities, and make an audience question the object’s authenticity, but also the nature, origin and limits of their own knowledge.
He sees the combination of hand-making and allegorical references in his works as a form of “the craft" that shapes both maker and user. Humour is employed as a stylistic device to induce joy and emphatic effect. This enhances dialogue between object, user and its place in culture. In this way the craft element in his work is both linguistic and experiential.
The above design features aim to seduce the viewer into narratives of themes and concepts rarely addressed in contemporary design, i.e. forms of Eros and Thanatos, and sex and death. In such a way he explores affect theory as methodology and asks in what ways affect can inform critical practice through the ‘reading’ of objects?
His current research explores how intersections and relationships between creation myths and the creative process can inform practice-based design and research methodologies through active imagination, and how this could increase individual consciousness.
In his academic research and teaching practice the above translates into questions of how learning experiences can be enhanced through performative teaching and the design of learning tools encouraging critical awareness through design? So his research and teaching practice participate in discourses aiming to spark new and different ways of thinking through design practice.
Moorer lectures, gives workshops and offers consultancy for education programs on the creative process, conceptual and critical thinking. His practice and output include designs for industry, bespoke and catwalk pieces, interior design objects for galleries, installation, performance and short film.
His work has been exhibited internationally in places such as The Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, MAD Paris, FIT New York, Saatchi Gallery London and with the British Council and Design Museum London.
Articles
Moorer, E. ‘Critical Approaches in Footwear Design Practice’ (2017) for Fashion Theory Russia.
Moorer, E. ‘DESIGNING FREEDOM: an investigation into critical pedagogy and anarchist practice’ (2021) for Apria Journal.
Conference, Symposium, and Workshop items
The Politics of Design: intersecting diverse perspectives in theory and practise (2021). Organiser of symposium: “A day of lectures evolving around current topics that touch on the intersection between design, politics and social action. Theoretical lectures, combined with practise- based research and practical talks that explore diversity in design and through design, alternative materials, new techniques and innovative technologies. Combining theory and practise, individual and society through integrating thought, action and process”.
Pandora’s Box (2020). Educational tools designed to aid active imagination in the form of creative workshops.
The Pervert’s Critique (2019). Paper presented at “Imagining the Unusual: Cognitive Dissonance, Pattern Breaking and Other Fantastic Beasts”: an interdisciplinary conference in Moscow, September 2019
Critical Kinaesthetics (2019). Educational tools designed to aid active imagination and critical awareness in the form of creative workshops.
Anxiety Island (2018), a proposal for learning in a socio-therapeutic context for the “Footnotes” exhibition
Emergency Games- installation and speaker at AAO Ethics/ Aesthetics International Conference 02, Benaki Museum, Athens (2011) The conference “presents the projects of the participants in the main exhibition, the inventive strategies they adopted and their works’ media and objectives in an attempt to assess today’s pressing social and ecological needs and the ways they are addressed”.
Recent Exhibitions
Tripostal Lille, Colors, etc, 2021
Gallery Fumi, It’s Good To Be Home, London, 2020
Design Museum Gent, Kleureyck: Van Eyck’s Colours in Design, 2020-21 Musee Des Arts Decoratifs Paris, Marche Demarche, 2019-2020
Venice Architecture Biennale/ National Museo De Arte Decorativo Buenos Aires/Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology (BIFT), Why What Who- tour, 2018-19
Sutton House London, Footnotes, 2018
Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rein Germany, Maker’s Library, 2015 St Etienne Design Biennale, Vous etes dit bizarre?, 2015
MUDAC Lausanne, Nirvana- Strange Forms of Pleasure, 2014-15
Kunsthaus Wien/ Museum Hundertwasser, SHOETING STARS. SHOES IN ART AND DESIGN, 2014 Kunsthal Rotterdam, S.H.O.E.S. over hoge hakken en echte liefde, 2014
MoBA 2013, Elevation at Fetishism in Fashion, Arnhem, 2013 Grassi Museum Leipzig, Starker Auftritt, 2013
Bloomberg HQ London, Waste Not Wanted 04, 2013
Creative Research Workshops
Critical Kinaesthetics (2020) at HEAD Geneva
Pandora’s Box: the Pervert’s Critique (2019) at HEAD Geneva
The Dandy in the Age of One Direction (2017) at HEAD Geneva
Design Passionnel, or, the Libertine (2016) at HEAD Geneva
Heels From Hell (2012) at HEAD Geneva
Teaching
MA FOOTWEAR course philosophy
“Original is not only what has never been done before but more so that which is truly you”.
MA Footwear offers a coherent balance between concept and craft, between critical thinking and thinking through making. Students from a broad array of design backgrounds are challenged to consider and define for themselves what footwear means, and, to challenge and to develop innovative solutions through questioning what footwear can be.
We focus on developing a critical studio practice where students are active participants in determining areas of investigation and deeper research enquiry from different cultural perspectives.
In doing so, we essentially investigate how social, political, cultural, and technological issues inform new approaches to the design of footwear and lower extremities.
Over the years we have seen proposals that explore these contexts in more detail - commercial, artistic, experimental, conceptual. We have seen how work is informed by innovative thinking about alternative materials and technologies that engage with contemporary socio-political issues. For example, projects where footwear engages with mental health and wellbeing, such as obesity and depression, and also with orthopaedics: asking what footwear is without a foot?, explorations in the possibilities for footwear in virtual retail space, footwear for game space, footwear as products cradling interior fashion, shoes that offer new aesthetic possibilities through new ways of making, and last, footwear that raises questions as performative footwear, as artefacts of wonder.
