Inside the ten-footer

A studio visit with bespoke Western boot maker and artist Sarah Madeleine T. Guerin

Sarah Madeleine T. Guerin, aka Saboteuse, “Ivy.” Photo by Becky Behar

Artist and bespoke Western boot maker Sarah Madeleine T. Guerin comes from Lynn and Swampscott – a region thick with shoemaking history, which she wasn’t entirely aware of as she pursued her passion for, well, making shoes. She studied architecture at RISD, went to London College of Fashion’s Cordwainers College (and yes, a cordwainer is a shoemaker), and ultimately apprenticed with Western boot maker Jim Covington.

Sarah crafts custom-made boots (base price: $6,200) like the pair above stitched with an ivy design. And she makes and exhibits boot-based art because – like many artists – she just has to. Making art is how she thinks, how she feels her way through. She’s also a keen participant/observer of the sociological dynamics of art and labor. And, now awake to the invisible history she grew up with, she has become a scholar of the history of footwear, perhaps especially local footwear history.

To that end, her studio, a shed along the Mill River behind her home in Wakefield, replicates a “ten-footer,” the kind of shoe shop common along the streets of Lynn 200 years ago. For this week’s Working Artist story in the Boston Globe, photographer Pat Greenhouse and I visited Sarah there.