Child Victims of War

By Amanda Tarling

How do you show the effects of war on more than six million children? That was the question that tugged at the heart of artist Stella Meades in 1996. Shocked by the millions of children affected by war, she created an installation of 1001 hand-built, child-sized ceramic shoes. The shoes were unglazed, smoke-blackened, and altered to suggest some of the ways in which children have suffered in wars. Each shoe represented 6,000 children. The collection, titled Footnote, was designed to be a visual illustration of numbers and facts about the child victims of war that we may find hard to understand.

After exhibits in Winnipeg and Toronto in 1996 and 1997, the shoes were stored. But in 2006, the present world climate of war prompted Meades, now living in Parksville, to do something that would help war-affected children heal. She sent a shoe to interested people and asked them to make something to hold, cover or contain it that would symbolize the recovery from the damage to children caused by war. Soon she was receiving replies from all over the world, and it evolved into the Global Community Shoe Project, with individual exhibits called FOOTSTEPS.

Now a group of these embellished shoes will be on display at Capital Unitarian Universalist Congregation during and after their Sunday Service. The Congregation meets at 234 Menzies Street, James Bay Victoria. The service begins at 10am and the shoes will be on display after the service from 11 am to noon. 

The shoes in the exhibit will be for sale by donation, with all proceeds going to the Unitarian Universalist-United Nations Office "Every Child is Our Child" campaign. The program is based in Eastern Ghana, and has helped 160 children to attend school who have lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS.

For more information, contact Amanda Tarling 250 382-6828. To view some of the shoes, go to