（including some themes for the project, some to-do lists and recipes during making）
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We put some process documentation (mainly making the materials & recipes) under page Recipes, formulas and iterations and Prototypes to make this final page clearer and more focusing on feedback and reflection.
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Sole to Soil
Materials: Sodium Alginate, Coffee Grains, Oil, Glycerin, Calcium Chloride, Corn Husk Fiber, Pomelo Peel, Dragonfruit Peel, Chestnuts Shells, Mushroom spawn, Seeds, Thermoplastic Polyeruthane, Moss
Dimensions: 110 cm x 365 cm x 80 cm
Sole to Soil is a speculative biomaterial design project envisioning footwear for a future where humans return to living in harmony with nature, embracing a symbiotic relationship with plants rather than exploiting them as mere decorative elements. The collection reimagines shoes as transitional tools for reconnection, adaptation, and eventual obsolescence. Starting with bio-leather barefoot shoes crafted from food waste, the designs mimic modern footwear’s comfort and aesthetics while encouraging sensory engagement with the ground. As the series progresses, the shoes become minimal, wrapping feet lightly before culminating in plant-integrated structures grown with moss and seeds. These "living shoes" dissolve into the soil, sprouting new life when discarded, transforming waste into regeneration.
This project critiques the synthetic, wasteful shoe industry and proposes a circular, biodegradable alternative. It challenges us to design for a future where humans no longer need shoes, allowing our steps to nurture the earth and foster coexistence instead of leaving harmful footprints.
another modified version for artist statement!
What are we wearing and carrying every day? What are the traces and footprints we leave behind? What about our ancestors, before we invented shoes?…
Nowadays, many of us are so used to walking in contemporary shoes – shoes that are manufactured, commodified, tight, with boasted thick cushions and certain aesthetics, yet hard to recycle; We move “forward”, stepping on nature, pulling up “weeds”, “paving” our ways with cement. Yet, wait a moment: What traces and footprints do we hope to leave behind? What “road” do we want to have?
How can we gradually shift what we wear, how we walk, how we produce, and reimagine how we can relate/connect to the ground? What if we start to make our own shoes at home using our kitchen leftovers, with open-sourced DIY-shoe tutorials? Keeping some contemporary footwear’s comfortness and aesthetics, the bio-leather barefoot shoes allow for closer touch with the ground. Then, gradually, other future shoes we make can be more minimal; Toes can spread out more naturally. When no longer worn, these “living shoes” contained with local seeds will dissolve into soil, sprouting new life where we left footprints before.
And what about the daily shoes we wear now? 100 years later, maybe somewhere, left with moss, found, and displayed on a museum pedestal, saying: Why still claim a Human Road? “We” are already and have since our ancestry always been together, foot in and with grass and soil.