Explore recovery as a shared act of moving forward. At once personal and collective, as well as full of detours.
At the heart of Walk in My Shoes is Put Your Foot Down II, a large-scale participatory floor-based artwork which will be activated by visitor’s footsteps. Led by Salford-based artist Maisie Pritchard and co-created with people in recovery, this two-day event shares the creative processes developed through the project Walk in My Shoes. Audiences are invited to explore journeying as a metaphor for recovery, something personal, collective and never simply linear.
As gallery visitors move across the work, each footstep compress the material surface and leaves a trace; as more take part, footprints will overlap, intersect and fade, registering a moment of contact. The work becoming an evolving field of shared movement, where individual journeys are held within a collective landscape. The process proposes portraiture as something communal, created through the accumulated traces of embodied collective participation.
Alongside the installation, visitors will be able to handle sculptural tools made from found objects, developed through hands-on workshops for playful mark-making. Displayed as artworks, they invite mark making as a form of activation, contributing to a growing archive of materials, movements and memory.
Through active participation, audiences are invited to ‘walk in the shoes’ of those in recovery and to consider it, not as a singular pathway but as a multiple destination point. A continuing process shaped by shared and collective experience.
Walk in My Shoes is a Portraits of Recovery commission, developed and delivered in partnership with Salford Museum & Art Gallery and Paradise Works. Generously funded by Achieve Recovery Asset Fund.
Through exhibitions, performances and creative events, Recoverist Month places the arts at the centre of conversations on substance use and recovery. Held every September to mark International Recovery Month, this annual programme brings artists, communities and audiences together across venues around the UK, making a vibrant contribution to the contemporary cultural landscape.
About the artist
Maisie Pritchard is a sculptor and participatory artist whose practice explores materials, making and participation. Using everyday objects, improvised tools and found materials, she develops accessible ways of creating and learning through making. Working across sculpture, installation and socially engaged practice, she is interested in how people interact with artworks and spaces, and how participation can shape both the process and outcome of a work. Through workshops, public projects and collaborative making, she creates opportunities for experimentation, conversation and collective experience, encouraging creativity as something that can be shared, accessible and part of everyday life.
She holds a BA in Fine Art from Manchester School of Art and has an active role across the Northwest, having worked with organisations such as HOME, Get It Done & the National Festival of Making. Recent projects include Make Yourself at HOME, a public making project commissioned for Push Festival 2025, Fittings supported by The Haworth Trust, FINGER! at The Manchester Contemporary, Output/Input at Paradise Works, and Bushcrafters at Prism Contemporary + The Second Act. Maisie has recently invested in her studio and making practice through support from Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice Grant and an Early-Mid Career Award from The Haworth Trust Scholarship Programme.
