Left or Right?

2023

Nappa leather, gold block foiling, soling board, upcycled shoe parts

40 × 60 × 10 cm

Left or Right? is a sculptural footwear work that stages choice as a moment of suspension. The form resembles a junction, with a left and a right shoe aligned in parallel yet oriented in opposing directions. Rather than offering resolution, the work holds the body at a point of indecision.

Building on Cope’s ongoing interest in footwear as a director of movement, the piece reframes the foot as a site where orientation and agency are negotiated. The pairing of left and right introduces a fundamental bodily duality, transforming gait into a question rather than an outcome. Direction is presented not as progress alone, but as a decision that must be consciously inhabited.

Originally conceived as a navigational provocation for the exhibition The Wisdom Is in Your Feet at the Hub, Sleaford, the work invited audiences to determine their own route through two equally weighted exhibition paths. Positioned at the point of entry, the object extended its logic beyond the body to the viewer, framing autonomy and decision‑making as shared conditions. In this way, Left or Right? operates not only as a sculptural artefact, but as a tool for activating awareness of choice -where orientation becomes an embodied, participatory act.