Starting Point

I grew up near Northampton, where traditional British shoemaking still survives. I always admired the care and precision that goes into handmade shoes. It wasn’t nostalgia or romanticism that drew me in, but the way making can be a form of thinking.

A Difficult Material

Each year, over a billion tyres reach the end of their usable life. In the UK alone, that’s around 600,000 tonnes of vulcanised rubber waste. It is extremely durable and almost impossible to break down, so most of it ends up stockpiled or buried.

Why This Material

Tyre rubber is stubborn. It refuses to degrade and resists most conventional recycling. That resistance made it interesting. I wanted to see what would happen when a material designed to not be reworked was placed in the hands of a craft-based, iterative making process.

Working Through Hands and Tools

The project became an experiment in cutting, laminating, shaping and stitching waste rubber. I tested how far it could flex, compress, bond and hold its form. I tried traditional shoemaking techniques, but adapted them to a material that behaves completely differently to leather. The work happened slowly, through prototypes that failed, cracked, stretched or held together in surprising ways.

What Emerged

The result was less about producing a perfect final object and more about developing a vocabulary for how rubber can be worked when treated as a craft material rather than industrial scrap. It became a dialogue between inherited technique and a contemporary waste problem, carried out directly through making rather than theory.