Geoffrey Hendricks’s Sky Boots

A sculpture of creased, worn, lace-up men’s work boots, covered entirely in a painted bright blue sky with white clouds.

Geoffrey Hendricks, Sky Boots (Sunday), 1992, bronze, gesso, and acrylic, Mead Art Museum

Description and Overview

Geoffrey Hendricks’ Sky Boots (Sunday), created in 1992, is a unique sculpture that exemplifies his ability to merge the tangible elements of everyday life with the ethereal, infinite sky. The sculpture is a pair of life-size, well-worn work boots cast in bronze and transformed with acrylic paint into a blue sky with painted clouds. The boots appear worn and slouched, and are positioned right next to each other. The details are realistic, with heavy wear on the heels, long laces threaded halfway up, and sturdy stitching throughout. This casual arrangement makes the boots appear as if they have just been removed after a long day of labor and evokes the quiet, familiar routines of daily life and physicality. The entire surface of both boots, including the laces and the insides, is painted in blue, with painted clouds layered on top. They vary in shape, size, and color: some are small, fluffy, and bright white, while others are larger, stretched thin, or tinged with shades of light gray. The painted atmospheric surface is dynamic, realistic, and detail-oriented, transforming the sturdy, earthbound everyday objects into something more ethereal and thought-provoking. 

Whereas the 1992 edition, housed at the Mead Art Museum, was cast in bronze and then finished with acrylic paint, Hendricks’ first Sky Boots were created in 1965 when he applied acrylic paints directly onto a pair of old work boots he discovered in a barn on his newly acquired property in Nova Scotia.1 The transformation of these humble leather boots into objects in conversation with the sky and the metaphysical marked the beginning of a continuous engagement with the sky as a subject. This act of transforming objects from basic and material to celestial and ethereal, along with his general passion for sky imagery, became his signature, earning him the nickname “Cloudsmith,” which he wore with pride.2 Following Sky Boots, Hendricks devoted himself to painting white, fluffy clouds and blue skies on both canvas and everyday objects such as pillowcases, paper bags, cars, and even his own body.3 In doing so, he shifted the traditional boundaries of background and foreground; he brought together earth, sky, and the individual.4

Historical Significance and Analysis

Hendricks was a pioneering artist associated with the Fluxus movement. Sky Boots is a perfect example of Fluxus philosophy, which advocates for the integration of art with everyday life.5 Hendricks’ sky imagery challenges traditional artistic hierarchies and formalities, transforming his art into something both accessible and thought-provoking. Hendricks’ sky representations echo the works of Romantic painters such as Constable, Turner, and Friedrich, who meticulously captured realistic cloudscapes that were also rich in emotion.6 Moreover, Hendricks’ master’s work on Roman Baroque ceiling paintings, in which the depictions of the sky appear to dissolve the church ceilings on which they are created, influenced his vision and creative direction.7 However, his interpretation is distinct, bringing the sky to the forefront of the everyday human experience rather than presenting it as an idealized, dreamlike concept. Baerwarldt describes this distinction in Hendricks’ depictions of sky as a lack of infusion with the cosmic spirit of painting that is characteristic of the Renaissance.8 While not the sole origin of his unique style and fixation on sky imagery, Hendricks cited the loss of his sister when he was five years old as being deeply connected to his work with the sky. 9,10While opposed to the idea of heaven, as in Christianity, he spoke often of the idea of transcendence of physical death to an ethereal and spiritual dimension.11 His reflections, although retrospective, suggest that his sky imagery emerged subconsciously rather than from direct influences, serving as an emotional and spiritual conduit rather than a deliberate symbolic choice.12 Hendricks’ style and practice of art can only be called his own, reflecting his values and experiences, and uniting them with the natural world. He merged the material and immaterial, the earth-bound and the transcendent; as McCabe described it, “[his] iconography is not about abstraction, but about seeing the ordinary in a new light.”13

Hendricks’ art, especially in Sky Boots, can be seen as both whimsical and profound. He subverts expectations by covering boots—objects inherently connected with the ground, the quotidian, and human experience—in sky. He quite literally inverts the relationship between ground and sky and combines the physical with the metaphysical. In addition to providing a symbol of the individual, Sky Boots becomes a bridge of material and immaterial. This merging of physical and metaphysical is a common theme among other experimental and conceptual artists such as James Turrell. While not associated with the Fluxus movement, his art explores perception, space, and the immaterial through immersive light installations. As Adcock noted, “Turrell’s use of light engages the viewer’s space in ways that are essentially baroque with results that are essentially subjective and inexplicable.”14 Turrell, Hendricks, and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz all have turned to the sky, centering the atmosphere and clouds as the subject rather than the background. This focus is notable in general because clouds often “pose the problem of the unrepresentable” for artists because of their intangible yet physical nature.15 Additionally, the creative focus of these three artists reflect a shared belief that aligns with the Fluxus movement; that “art is experiential and spiritual rather than stylistic and aesthetic.16,17,18 They all illustrate the transient nature of reality and challenge the traditional boundaries between what is seen and what is felt, a sentiment that is especially invoked in Hendricks’ Sky Boots. 

Conclusion

Through his transformation of ordinary work boots into symbols of the sky and the ethereal, Hendricks channels the Fluxus ideal of deconstructing the boundaries between art, the everyday, and existential reflection.  The foregrounding of the sky in his pieces, especially Sky Boots, is not merely aesthetic; it symbolizes the merging of human experience with the natural world, remarks on “the yearning for transcendence and immortality,” and reminds us of the passage of time and its tight linkage with the weather, of the inevitable, and of our shared nature.19 Sky Boots exemplifies Hendricks’ unique ability to merge the terrestrial with the celestial and ethereal and to comment on the dynamic, fleeting, and intangible nature of life in doing so. Through Sky Boots, Hendricks compels his audience to connect with their surroundings and perceive the mundane as a vessel for reflection in an accessible and novel way.20

Footnotes

  1. “Geoffrey Hendricks: land / sky / dreams,” Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery. Accessed May 5, 2025. https://klausgallery.com/exhibition/geoffrey-hendricks-land-sky-dreams-2024-10-25/; Geoffrey Hendricks, Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia, and Rutgers University, 1958–1972. Rutgers University Press, 2003. ↩︎
  2. Roberta Smith, “Geoffrey Hendricks—Continuing Sky Dialogues,” New York Times, February 3, 2006. ↩︎
  3. Ryan Hladun, “Reaching for the Sky; Wag Exhibits Works by Geoffrey Hendricks,” Winnipeg Sun, January 13, 2005. ↩︎
  4. Wayne Baerwaldt, “The Sky: An Introduction,” in Between Earth & Sky: In Knowing One, One Will Know the Other—Geoffrey Hendricks (Confederation Centre Art Gallery, 2003), 11. ↩︎
  5. Hladun, 2005. ↩︎
  6. Robert Rosenblum, “Geoffrey Hendricks’ Cloudscapes,” in Geoffrey Hendricks, Robert Rosenblum, Marianne Bech, and Lars Movin, Geoffrey Hendricks: Day into Night: Or How Fluxus Helped Him to Discover a Personal Archaeology and to Raise Many of the Questions of Life, but Not Necessarily to Find Their Answers, through Both a Playful and a Serious Examination of the Sky, and of Other Natural and Unnatural Phenomena of Our Earth and of the Universe (Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik, 1993), TK. ↩︎
  7. Kristine Stiles, “Anomaly, Sky, Sex, and Psi in Fluxus,” in Hendricks, Critical Mass, TK. ↩︎
  8.  Baerwaldt, “The Sky.” ↩︎
  9. Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, interview with Geoff Hendricks, January 7, 2011, http://sexecology.org/research-writing/geoffrey-hendricks/. ↩︎
  10. Linda Yablonsky, oral history interview with Geoffrey Hendricks, 2016, Archives of American Art. https://jstor.org/stable/community.37996499. ↩︎
  11. Ibid. ↩︎
  12. Shauna McCabe, “Picnic Everyday and Every Way: Art & Life, Bodies & Place,” in Between Earth & Sky, 18. ↩︎
  13. Ibid. ↩︎
  14. Adcock, Craig. James Turrell: The Art of Light and Space (University of California Press, 1990). ↩︎
  15. Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford University Press, 2002). ↩︎
  16. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015). ↩︎
  17. Stiles, “Anomaly.” ↩︎
  18. Damisch, Theory of /Cloud/. ↩︎
  19. Baerwaldt, “The Sky.” ↩︎
  20.  Stiles, “Anomaly.” ↩︎