NEVEN presents a solo exhibition by Adam Lewis Jacob, centred on a series of sculptural works made from worn and discarded footwear, shown within an installation conceived for the gallery.

Rooted in processes of fragmentation and montage, Adam’s practice assembles meaning through cut-up techniques and the rearrangement of found, archival, and self-produced material. His shoe sculptures extend this logic, transforming existing, lived-in objects already marked by use and circulation through dismantling, inverting, binding, ripping, twisting and reconstructing. In the process, unexpected details emerge: a vibrantly coloured midsole, manufacturer codes, loose threads, the uneven patina of old glue. Elements usually concealed become the artworks' surfaces. Adam names the sculptures after words and numbers uncovered within: makers’ marks, fragments of place names and production codes, many of which point to Chinese manufacture while borrowing the language of European luxury, are recombined into titles that sound simultaneously familiar and strange.

Arguably the most bodily of everyday objects, shoes carry dense social and psychological associations. At once intimate possessions and mass-produced commodities, they move through systems of manufacture, distribution, use and disposal, accumulating both personal histories and broader economic, social and cultural implications. The high-heeled shoe in particular carries legacies of class, labour, sexuality and performance, yet Adam’s interventions disrupt it as both functional commodity and object of desire, its seductive surface giving way instead to exposed indexes of industry and circulation.

The process of unmaking runs throughout the exhibition. Rather than concealing the practical processes of exhibition making, the show’s creation becomes its guiding logic. Offcuts of plasterboard used to build the plinths remain in the space. Storage and transit boxes, sourced from the Scottish-Italian restaurant beneath Adam’s studio complex in Glasgow, become display devices and containers for remnants cut from the shoes. These small feedback loops connect the making and exhibiting of the works to wider cycles of production, circulation, use and reuse.