Ives Long is a multidisciplinary  artist based in New York most recently working on her series Protective Soles, where she explores the knot, a body of work untangling pain from shame through twelve performances inclusive of poetry, sculpture, and film. Her work aims to deconstruct primal performance through binding herself to her art, illuminating her relationship to ancestry, inherited memory, freedom, and identity. 

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Beginning with sculpture, Ives began braiding hair into wearable, yet unwalkable, shoes after visiting the plantation where her family was once enslaved. Walking the same ground as her ancestors became a profound act of remembrance and a central point of departure for her practice. From there, the knot became both material and metaphor as Ives attempted to digest the weight of the experience. She found herself becoming the very knot she kept encountering—an embodiment of the entanglement of memory, inherited pain, shame, identity, and desire for liberation. This tension is physically present in her sculptural heel, as they can be placed on the feet, but cannot be walked in. The shoes offer a gesture toward empathy while acknowledging its limits—the impossibility of ever fully inhabiting another person’s experience. We can stand beside one another, but we remain, ultimately, alone within our own bodies and histories.

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Over years of creating these sculptural works, Ives began incorporating poetry and performance as a way of extending the physical language of the sculptures. Having become the knot herself, she began the ongoing process of untangling.

These explorations have evolved into a twelve-part series, currently in progress, in which sculpture, movement, spoken word, photography, and film become interconnected forms of expression. Her most recently published work, REBIRTH, is a live performance in which Ives uses a single braid originating from her own head to weave her naked body until she becomes the knot itself. Throughout the performance, freedom spikes become intertwined within the braid, symbolizing the inseparable relationship between freedom and tension, healing and resistance. The performance was documented through photography and Super 8 film, extending the ephemeral act into moving image and editorial still photography. These visual works are accompanied by original spoken-word poetry, creating a layered narrative that moves between the emotional, spiritual, and physical dimensions of the work.

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At the center of Ives’s practice is an ongoing question: What does it mean to carry what came before us, and how do we begin to untangle ourselves from it?

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Contact: haileyives@gmail.com