Jo Hepburn is an artist working across sculpture, performance, and embodied encounter. Her work explores the relationship between objects, gestures, and the social and spatial systems we navigate daily. Through processes of improvisation, material play, and refusal, she makes sculptural propositions that are as much about movement and disruption as they are about form.

Improvisation acts as both a tool and a metaphor in her practice, inviting failure, surprise, and humour. Her assemblages often start with the familiar, but are worked, reworked, and gently unsettled. Using fragile or unruly materials, she builds works that resist polish or finality, leaning instead into the awkward, the restrained, and the nearly-coming-undone.

Jo is interested in how objects and actions register the residue of encounter: how memory might be reconstructed, how gestures leave traces, and how the provisional can be a kind of knowledge. Her work often walks a line between sincerity and absurdity, proposing that the act of making is also an act of re-seeing - of attending to what we usually overlook.

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Jo is the founder of The Crit Collective, an artist-led initiative that supports experimental approaches to looking, talking, and thinking-with artworks. Alongside her studio practice, she facilitates crits that explore critique as a live, embodied, and relational act. She is also a BA Fine Art lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire.