SARAH MADELEINE T. GUERIN
Wakefield, MA
saboteuse.com
IG: saboteusebespoke
A bicultural artisan, Sarah builds Western boots by hand with the passion of a New England work ethic and her French design sensibilities. A graduate of programs in Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and Intensive Footwear at London College of Fashion’s Cordwainers College, Sarah’s design skills were complimented by years of training in a variety of hands-on workshops culminating in one-on-one training with Western bootmaker Jim Covington. She established the atelier Saboteuse in 2015.
Driven by a creative process, Sarah intentionally combines bootmaking, artmaking, historical research, and public engagement to better understand the relationships between knowledge and quality. Steeped in tradition, her work illustrates meticulous craftsmanship and the unique, thoughtful creativity that makes Saboteuse boots stand apart. Sarah’s provocative bootmaking practice is but one part of a life-long body of work. With every stitch and decision, Sarah slowly builds beautiful handmade boots that tell a good story – as her clients become collaborative co-authors of this traditional American craft narrative, and her artwork critiques whose voices are heard within our footwear traditions.
Over 35 complex and labor-intensive processes go into handmade footwear. I build leather Western boots by hand using traditional tools, taking over 100 hours to complete each pair. My work reflects meticulous technique, material awareness, and my creative drive to produce unique designs steeped in tradition. Handmade Footwear straddles the worlds of art, craft, design, and apparel without any discipline claiming this extraordinarily complex set of processes. I research the globally significant footwear history of Massachusetts and its relationships to our contemporary living traditions in my process-driven practice. To keep this knowledge alive, I educate different publics on footwear craft. Fundamentally I think through making, using this iconic American craft to articulate my experiences as an authentic practice that seeks to answer the questions life presents. Leaving a deliberate footprint is my philosophical and literal goal. My work is more than the handmade footwear and art pieces I produce, it is a quest to understand how this beautiful unforgiving craft fits into the human story.
HERE | Interview with Sarah Madeleine T. Guerin on “The Stitchdown Shoecast”
Flags of Our Foremothers
Ostrich Leather, repurposed leather skirt, leather, wood, metal, rubber, silk, Susan B. Anthony and Sacajawea US coins
2022
Photo by Becky Behar
Representation of American Flags in Western boot design is overwhelmingly masculine. Women primarily sewed both flags and boot tops while denied full bootmaking knowledge. I honor American heroes Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Ona Judge, Susan B. Anthony, Sacajawea, and every unrecognized woman sewing through history. The crossed needles reference Civil War sabers and the bootstraps reference Martin Luther King, “It is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps”. Building boots as a woman is resistance to counter American racism and misogyny with symbols of national pride. I built the boots from raw materials using traditional Western bootmaking techniques and traditional hand tools. I used a sewing machine for the top stitching. The soles are hand-stitched, as are the structural inseaming and side-seaming. The white leather is a repurposed woman’s skirt. The coins embedded in the boot heels are glued in. All leather inlay and overlay cutting is with an Xacto blade. I used a vintage 1950s Krentler last (forme) for the boot’s design.
Flags of our Foremothers were part of the exhibition Fashioning America: Grit to Glamour, curated by Michelle Finamore, at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and then the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2022-2023.
Wisteria
Leather, glue, nylon thread, linen thread, beeswax, wood
2017
Photo by Beck Behar
Wisteria
Cast bronze
2021
Photo by Beck Behar
CRUMP 2020
Hair-on cow leather, Kid leather, ribbon, wood, metal, wax, nylon thread, rubber, ‘Naughty Nellie’ bootjack
2023
In the summer of 2020 NY Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave a speech before Congress about violent language toward women in our culture that rang true to me. She articulated in ways I felt I failed to do, the general apathy and acceptance of aggressive language targeting women. Her words were on my mind that fall, when in a community Facebook forum in my small New England town, a dad I knew from high school Marching Band, a Boy Scout leader, posted this language in response to a woman sharing anti-racist resources:
Over 300 fellow townspeople replied to the subject of racism and only one mentioned the simmering violence of Jeff Crump’s language. In this work, I used the symbolism of boots as protection from these words, and simultaneously reference the permanence of words that harm us, that we wear invisibly throughout our lives. The Western boot canon typically expresses an idealized character of the wearer, but here the design showcased the true character of a man’s own words. The graphic allusion to the Trump 2020 campaign signifies a time of increased public aggression toward women. The boot jack “Naughty Nellie”, a historical Americana object that requires stepping on a woman’s face and breasts to remove one’s boots, accompanies the work. Creation was fully funded by two grants: a Puffin Foundation Visual Arts Grant and the Artist’s Resource Trust Fund from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation.
The footwear in the exhibition is all bespoke – and therefore custom-made for the customer. If available, we have provided contact information for you to learn more about how this process works with each of the artists.