Devon artist recycling Royal Ballet shoes into jewellery

An artist has been recycling pointe shoes from the Royal Ballet and Opera by turning them into art.

The dancers often use the shoes for one day only due to the rigorous nature of the dancing and Rachel O’Connell has found a way for the high quality leather to be reused.

The sustainable artist from Brownston, near Modbury, Devon, turns the material into a range of items including earrings and bracelets.

She strips the leather from the shoes and then uses the traditional art of marbling to decorate it, before converting it into jewellery to sell with some of the profit going to charity.

The ballerinas at the Royal Ballet and Opera get through about 6,000 pairs of pointe shoes a year.

Environmental manager at the company, Rachael O’Sullivan, said: “A pair of ballet shoes will often only last a day, so they will have a rehearsal and a performance in them and then they can’t use them because the are broken quite often.

“They won’t provide the support they need, so that’s why we go through so many.

“We are obviously very keen to find ways to recycle them or give them another life if we can.”

The ballet has found a number of partnerships with other charities and community organisations for the objects they no longer need after a production including lighting and fabric, in order to be as sustainable as possible.

It has been working with social enterprise company Blue Patch, which connects businesses with waste to recycle with sustainable makers who can use it.

Ms O’Connell was matched with the ballet due to her skills as a leather worker and marbling artist .

She has been decorating leather using European marbling techniques for the last 13 years using her own technique.

She strips and cleans the pointe shoes and prepares the remaining leather before dipping it in a marbled ink pattern.

The decorated leather can then be dried and shaped into earrings, cuff-links and keychains.

She said: “It’s a real privilege because they (the shoes) are made by another heritage craft maker and I feel it’s saving it from landfill.

“I can repurpose something that’s danced across the stage and I’m turning it into something that’s usable and practical, but also beautiful.”

Ms O’Connell said she was one of about 20 professional marblers left in the UK.

The Heritage Crafts Red List of Endangered Crafts has named marbling as a traditional crafts struggling to survive into the next generation.

She said: “Some of those marblers are due for retirement soon.

“I have issues finding an apprentice because I live in rural Devon and there’s no transport links.”

The material from the ballet are free and some of the profits from sales goes to the anti-poverty charity Trusell Trust.

She hopes that one day a famous prima ballerina might ask her to create art from their shoes.

“It would be really nice to marble a whole shoe… I’ve got to work out how to do that on synthetic material,” she said.