"On January 17th 1912 five men arrived at the South Pole. They had walked eight hundred miles and they got there second. Four of them kept diaries. One of them - the Welshman - told stories. Two months later they were all dead. Their texts survived: his stories vanished. Dead men's shoes combines original documentary photographs and texts with innovative staging techniques in an evocation - in word and image - of the psychological, physical and emotional pressures of that fateful journey".
Dead men's shoes marked the first major collaboration between Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes; and took as its theme Robert Falcon Scott's fateful expedition to the South Pole in 1912, through a specific examination of the role and fate of seaman Edgar Evans.
The resulting eighty minute work followed the text and delivery of a complex monologue, written and performed by Mike Pearson after a period of research at the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge and drawing upon material as diverse as the screenplay to Charles Frend's feature film 'Scott of the Antarctic' (1948) and Scott's own letters to Mrs. Edgar Evans.
Mike Brookes' slide installation, using seven computer-controlled projectors across a fifty foot canvas screen, created a parallel visual work and ambient context through the assemblage and manipulation of original photographic images from Scott's 'Discovery' and 'Terra Nova' Antarctic expeditions, many of which had rarely before been seen in public. Besides fragments of Herbert Ponting's well-known formal compositions, Brookes used details from the personal snap-shots of crew members and Bowers’ little known photos of the polar journey itself.
Dead men's shoes was initially developed and presented within the gallery of the Welsh Maritime Museum, Cardiff, 1997
* for further related material please try the informal archive developing behind the chronologies of recent projects at .../shame
© Pearson/Brookes